CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#xna
Acidic
Acidic

Reputation: 6282

Working with tables

I'm making a small game using XNA, but it is cumbersome to effectively type-in the stats to all the entities in the game.

I was thinking that it would be much simpler to save the required information in a separate file with a table-format and use that instead.

I have looked into reading Excel tables with C# but it seems to be overly complex.
Is there any other table-format file types that let me easily edit the contents of the file and also read the contents using C# without too much hassle??
Basically, is there any other simple alternative to Excel? I just need the simplest table files to save some text in.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 148

Answers (3)

ClassicThunder
ClassicThunder

Reputation: 1936

If you are comfortable using Excel try exporting to a .CSV (Comma Seperate Value) file. The literal string will look like below.

row1col1,row1col2\nrow2col1,row2col2\nrow3col1,row3col2

The format is incredibly simple. Each row is on a separate line (separated by "\n") and the columns within a line are separated by commas. Very easy to parse just iterate though the lines and split on the commas.

while ((row = tr.ReadLine()) != null)
{
    row.split(",")[0] //first column 
    row.split(",")[1] //second column 
    row.split(",")[2] //ect...
}

Upvotes: 1

vesuvious
vesuvious

Reputation: 2753

This may be overkill, but SQLlite might be worth looking into if you want expand-ability and maintainability. It is an easy setup and learning SQL will be useful in many applications.

This is a good tutorial to get you started:

http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/157830-using-sqlite-with-c%23/

I understand if this isn't exactly what you were looking for, but I wanted to give you a broader range of options. If you are going for absolute simplicity go with CSV or XML like Alexei said.

Edit: If necessary there is a C# SQLlite version for managed environments(XBOX,WP7) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/47127/282261.aspx

Upvotes: 1

Alexei Levenkov
Alexei Levenkov

Reputation: 100547

CSV is probably the simplest format to store table data, Excel can save data in it. There is no built in classes to read data from CSV as far as I know.

You may also consider XML or JSON to store data if you want some more structured data. Both have built in classes to serialize objects to/from.

Upvotes: 4

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