CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#searchtext
Jt2ouan
Jt2ouan

Reputation: 1964

Searching for text in a .txt

What would be the best way to search a text file that looks like this..?

efee|| Nbr| Address| Name |Phone|City|State|Zip
abc ||455|gsgd |first last|gsg |fef |jk |0393
gjgj||jfj|ddg
|first last|fht |ree |hn |th ...more lines...

I started by reading in the file and all its contexts with a streamreader I was thinking to count the "|" and grab the text between the 5th and 6th using substring but i'm not sure how to do the count of the "|". Or if someone has a better idea I'm open to it. Tried something like this:

StreamReader file = new StreamReader(@"...");
        string line;
        int num=0;
        while ((line = file.ReadLine()) != null)
        {
            for (int i = 1; i <= 6; i++)
            {
                if (line.Contains("|"))
                {
                    num++;
                }
            }
            int start = line.IndexOf("|");

            int end = line.IndexOf("|");
            string result = line.Substring(start, end - start - 1);
        }

The text I want I beleive is always between the 5th and 6th "|"

Upvotes: 3

Views: 257

Answers (4)

Oded
Oded

Reputation: 499062

For a delimited file you should use a parser - there is one in the Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO namespace - the TextFieldParser class, though you could also look at third-party libraries like the popular FileHelpers.

A simpler approach would be to use string.Split on the | character and getting the value in the corresponding index of the returned string[], however, if any of the fields are escaped and can validly contain | internally, this will fail.

Upvotes: 1

Sergey Kalinichenko
Sergey Kalinichenko

Reputation: 726639

You can do it like this:

var res = File
    .ReadLines(@"FileName.txt")
    .Select(line => line.Split(new[]{'|'}, StringSplitOptions.None)[5])
    .ToList();

This produces a List<strings> from the file, where each string is the part of the corresponding line of the file taken from between the fifth and the sixth '|' separator.

Upvotes: 2

VladL
VladL

Reputation: 13033

This should work

string txt = File.ReadAllText("file.txt");
string res = Regex.Match(txt, "\\|*?{5}(.+?)\\|", RegexOptions.Singleline).Result("$1");

Upvotes: 0

Jason
Jason

Reputation: 1784

You could split each line into an array:

while ((line = file.ReadLine()) != null)
{
    var values = line.Split('|');
}

Upvotes: 0

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