Question

lets say i have 5 lines within a txt file called users.txt each line has the following information

username:password

how would i go about spliting each line within a txt file and store the username as one string and password as the other.

I have the code to grab a random line using this code. This code is used for another part of my project aswell so I dont want the code to be altered. I was thinking after the line has been grabbed call another function but I have no idea on how to split it with the :

private static string GetRandomLine(string file)
    {
        List<string> lines = new List<string>();

        Random rnd = new Random();

        int i = 0;


        try
        {
            if (File.Exists(file))
            {
                //StreamReader to read our file
                StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(file);

                //Now we loop through each line of our text file
                //adding each line to our list
                while (!(reader.Peek() == -1))
                    lines.Add(reader.ReadLine());

                //Now we need a random number
                i = rnd.Next(lines.Count);

                //Close our StreamReader
                reader.Close();

                //Dispose of the instance
                reader.Dispose();

                //Now write out the random line to the TextBox
                return lines[i].Trim();

            }
            else
            {
                //file doesn't exist so return nothing
                return string.Empty;
            }
        }
        catch (IOException ex)
        {
            MessageBox.Show("Error: " + ex.Message);
            return string.Empty;
        }
    }

Answer 1

This is much cleaner, and handles cases where the password might contain ‘:’s

Of course I would expect you to ensure that passwords are not plain text and hashed password’s don’t contain any ‘:’s; But just in case they do, this is what would work:

Split() will cause other problems.

        bool GetUsernamePassword(string line, ref string uname, ref string pwd)
        {
            int idx = line.IndexOf(':') ;
            if (idx == -1)
                return false;
            uname = line.Substring(0, idx);
            pwd = line.Substring(idx + 1);
            return true;
        }

.

            string username_password = "username:password";
            string uname = String.Empty;
            string pwd = String.Empty;
            if (!GetUsernamePassword(username_password, ref uname, ref pwd))
            {
                // Handle error: incorrect format
            }
            Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} {2}", username_password, uname, pwd);

btw. having said the above this won’t work (like all other solutions before this one) if the username has ‘:’ 😛 But this will handle the case where password has ‘:’.