Question

Is there a way to store the content of a file as string or as a dictionary instead of just its file path/name?

Below is the method that I am currently using for getting the file path from a Windows Form. Is there a way to adapt it or should I start from scratch? I am loading .ini files which is only text. LINQ seems to be one route but I am not familiar with it.

public void ShowSettingsGui()
{
    System.Windows.Forms.OpenFileDialog ofd = new System.Windows.Forms.OpenFileDialog();
    ofd.Multiselect = false;
    ofd.Filter = "Data Sources (*.ini)|*.ini*|All Files|*.*";
    if (ofd.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
    {
        string[] filePath = ofd.FileNames;
    }
    m_settings = Path.GetDirectoryName(ofd.FileName);
}

Answer 1

LINQ is indeed a nice way to do it: We simply convert the paths to a dictionary (where they become the keys). The values are determined by calling File.ReadAllText on every file path.

var dialog = new OpenFileDialog() { Multiselect = true, 
    Filter = "Data Sources (*.ini)|*.ini*|All Files|*.*" };
if (dialog.ShowDialog() != DialogResult.OK) return;
var paths = dialog.FileNames;
var fileContents = paths.ToDictionary(filePath => filePath, File.ReadAllText);

To help you understand what’s going one here, take a look at the (roughly equivalent) non-LINQ version. Here, we explicitly iterate over the FileNames and add them as keys to our dictionary while again calling File.ReadAllText on every one of them.

// same as first snippet without the last line
foreach (var filePath in paths)
{
    fileContents.Add(filePath, File.ReadAllText(filePath));
}

Set a breakpoint to the last line of each snippet, run them and take a look at the contents of the dictionary to determine the result.

EDIT: It wasn’t clear in the question, but it seems you’re only interested in a single file name. That means you don’t need LINQ at all (m_settings needs to be a string).

var dialog = new OpenFileDialog{Filter = "Data Sources (*.ini)|*.ini*|All Files|*.*"};
if (dialog.ShowDialog() != DialogResult.OK) return;
m_settings = File.ReadAllText(dialog.FileName);