Question

There are some cool classes and tricks and short cuts in C#. I know this but I have not worked with C# enough to have them memoried.

One cool trick is this. If you read from a file data that is arranged in a similar line-by-line structure where each line is arranged in columns spaced out by tabs, the data can be read into a kind of class in C# and then you can parse out one column of data by simply doing a “for each” command. Does anyone know off-hand how this is done?

Basically, what I am talking about is this. I understand how to read a file line by line:

int counter = 0;
string line;
System.IO.StreamReader file =
   new System.IO.StreamReader(filename);

while ((line = file.ReadLine()) != null)
{
    Console.WriteLine(line);
    counter++;
}

file.Close();

Now, how would I go about replacing Console.WriteLine(line); with code that will organize the data automatically into members of a class provided that the line columns in the input file are seperated by /t (tabs)?

Answer 1

You can call line.Split('\t') This will give you string[] array. You can then parse each element to proper data type.

MyData LineToMyData(string line)
{
    try
    {
        string[] arr = line.Split('\t');

        return new MyData()
        {
            Time = DateTime.Parse(arr[0]),
            Name = arr[1],
            Age = Int32.Parse(arr[2])
        };
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        throw new ArgumentException("line", ex);
    }
}