How to Read and Write Text

Reading and writing to text files had been made easy by .Net.

Following code will create a text file and insert 2 lines to it and will then read it and display.

1. // System.IO is required for file handling.
2. using System.IO;

1. // Creating a stream writer object.
2. // @ is used before the string to avoid the string getting broken by the /.
3. StreamWriter stWriter = new StreamWriter(@"C:\Backup\File.txt");
5. // Writing into the file.
6. stWriter.Write("It is now ");
7. stWriter.WriteLine(DateTime.Now);
8. stWriter.WriteLine("The End");
10. // Closing the file.
11. stWriter.Close();
13. // Reading the file.
14. // Checking the availability of the file.
15. if (File.Exists(@"C:\Backup\File.txt"))
16. {
17.     // Without using the @, \\ also can be used to represent \ inside of a string.
18.     using (StreamReader stReader = File.OpenText("C:\\Backup\\File.txt"))
19.     {
20.         // Temporary variable.
21.         string str = "";
22.         while ((str = stReader.ReadLine()) != null)
23.         {
24.             // Assigning to a label.
25.             label1.Text += str + "\n";
26.         }
27.     }
28. }
29. else
30.     MessageBox.Show("Error, File cannot be found.");