read triangle coordinates from a text file and put them in triangle class C#

Question

What I'm trying to do is to read triangle coordinates from a text file named "p102_triangles" whose data is like this:

-340,495,-153,-910,835,-947
-175,41,-421,-714,574,-645
-547,712,-352,579,951,-786
419,-864,-83,650,-399,171
-429,-89,-357,-930,296,-29
-734,-702,823,-745,-684,-62
...

What I did so far is making a triangle class accepting three Point type values for all the vertices. Each of these points have their own (x,y) coordinates. Then I read the file line by line. In each line I separate the comma separated values, convert them to integer and store them in an array of size 6 (each triangle has 6 coordination for 3 vertices). I make an object of class triangle and assign this values to each object. So basically after each line an objec of triangle is created. This is my code which works the way I want.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.IO;

namespace triangleContainment
{
    //Triangle class
    public class triangle
    {
        public Point point1;
        public Point point2;
        public Point point3;
        public triangle(Point point1, Point point2, Point point3)
        {
            this.point1 = point1;
            this.point2 = point2;
            this.point3 = point3;
        }
    }
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        //Global variables
        List<int> pos = new List<int>(new int[6]);
        List<triangle> triangle = new List<triangle>(new triangle[10000]);
        private void readValues() //start of reading file function
        {
            char[] delimiterChars = { ',' };
            System.IO.StreamReader file = new System.IO.StreamReader(@"C:\Users\DaVinci\Google Drive\C# Cloud\triangleContainment\triangleContainment\p102_triangles.txt");

            string line;
            int index = 0;
            while ((line = file.ReadLine()) != null)
            {
                string[] values = line.Split(delimiterChars);
                int i = 0;
                foreach (string v in values)
                {
                    pos[i] = Int32.Parse(v);
                    i++;
                }
                triangle[index] = new triangle(new Point(pos[0], pos[1]), new Point(pos[2], pos[3]), new Point(pos[4], pos[5]));
                index++;
            }

        }//end of reading file function
        private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            readValues();
        }
    }
}

Since I'm new to C# I just did it out of scratch. How can I make it better or shorter? How can I define my triangle class more efficient? Can I use anything other than collections?

Answer 1

You could make parsing part of Triangle class. You should also add some error checking.

public class Triangle {
    public Point Point1 {get;}
    public Point Point2 {get;}
    public Point Point3 {get;}
    public triangle(Point point1, Point point2, Point point3) {
        this.point1 = point1;
        this.point2 = point2;
        this.point3 = point3;
    }
    public static Triangle Parse(string str) {
        if (str == null) {
            throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(str));
        }
        var tok = str.Split(' ');
        if (tok.Length != 6) {
            throw new ArgumentException(nameof(str));
        }
        return new Triangle(
            new Point(int.Parse(tok[0]), int.Parse(tok[1]))
        ,   new Point(int.Parse(tok[2]), int.Parse(tok[3]))
        ,   new Point(int.Parse(tok[4]), int.Parse(tok[5]))
        );
    }
}

Do not use List like an array. You do not need index , use Add instead.

Make your triangle list like this:

List<Triangle> triangles = new List<Triangle>();
...
while ((line = file.ReadLine()) != null) {
    triangles.Add(Triangle.Parse(line));
}

Answer 2

Your Triangle class is essentially a class with three Point (which is a struct ). Therefore, it may be more representative to consider to put a Triangle as a struct too.

Alternatively, you could also use three Vector3 struct instances in XNA / Unity game library to define Triangle . This is more commonly used, I believe. Note: as you could represent Triangle in X,Y,Z coordinates instead of X,Y coordinate

Other than that, the way you do it (unless you want to process it further later on), IMHO, is good enough for your use.

Answer 3

If you just wanna make it shorter then I guess this will do... I re-created the triangle and point classes since I did it on console. Just disregard those.

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        string fileName = "readLines.txt";
        IEnumerable<string> lines = null;
        List<Triangle> triangles = new List<Triangle>();
        lines = File.ReadLines(fileName);

        foreach(var line in lines)
        {
            string[] lineValues = line.Split(',');
            triangles.Add(new Triangle(
                new Point(int.Parse(lineValues[0]), int.Parse(lineValues[1])),
                new Point(int.Parse(lineValues[2]), int.Parse(lineValues[3])),
                new Point(int.Parse(lineValues[4]), int.Parse(lineValues[5]))));
        }  

        Console.ReadLine();
    }

}

public class Triangle
{
    public Point point1;
    public Point point2;
    public Point point3;
    public Triangle(Point point1, Point point2, Point point3)
    {
        this.point1 = point1;
        this.point2 = point2;
        this.point3 = point3;
    }
}

public class Point
{
    public Point(int x, int y)
    {

    }
}