Question

This might be a very simple question for you, but I’m stumped. I’m trying to read text file that has double-space as the delimiter.

"ColHdr1"  "ColHdr2"  "ColHdr3"  "ColHdr4"  "ColHDR5"
"fu"  "bar"  1  2  3
"lorem"  "ipsum"  5  6  7

I want to put all the lines into a list except the header line. This is the code that I have so far:

string prnFile = @"c:\temp\test.prn";

var fileLines = new List<string>();

foreach (var line in File.ReadAllLines(prnFile, Encoding.GetEncoding(1250)).Skip(1))
{
    fileLines.Add(line.Split(new[] { "  " }, 
                StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries));
}

In the end, I want the list to look like:

"fu"  "bar"  1  2  3
"lorem"  "ipsum"  5  6  7

Any idea what I’m doing wrong?

Answer 1

Your code looks okay to me at first sight, but I’d use LINQ all the way:

var lines = File.ReadLines(prnFile, Encoding.GetEncoding(1250))
                .Skip(1)
                .Select(line => line.Split(new[] { "  " }, 
                                          StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries))
                .ToList();

That will get you a List<string[]>. It seems to work for me, but note that it won’t strip the double-quotes from the start/end of your strings.

If you really want a flattened list, that’s remarkably easy – just change Select to SelectMany:

var lines = File.ReadLines(prnFile, Encoding.GetEncoding(1250))
                .Skip(1)
                .SelectMany(line => line.Split(new[] { "  " }, 
                                          StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries))
                .ToList();

That gives you:

"fu"
"bar"
1
2
3
"lorem"
"ipsum"
5
6
7