Combobox loading text with invisible linefeed (\r) or newline (\n)

Question

I'm using c#, visual studio 2017, winforms and I'm having a problem with a combobox which is loading some text from a text file and when I select another line of text from the combobox, a linefeed (\\r) is added there, and it looks like it's somewhat invisible or better saying, it looks like a newline (\\n).

This is the combobox in question and the invisible linefeed (\\r). https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xhymg.png

When I debug the application I can see \\r added after that line of text. https://i.stack.imgur.com/km4F3.png

I've tried to use Encoding.Unicode when saving the text, but to no avail.

//This is how I save text to a file
private void SaveVarNameToFile()
{
    using (var writer = File.AppendText("savedVarName.txt"))
    {
        writer.Write(comboBox1.Text, Encoding.Unicode);
    }
}

//This is how I load the text to combobox
private void LoadStrTextFromFile(string fileName, ComboBox cb)
{
   if (!File.Exists(fileName))
            return;

   using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(fileName))
   {
      string x = reader.ReadToEnd();
      string[] y = x.Split('\n');
      foreach (string s in y)
      {
         cb.Items.Add(s);
      }
      reader.Close();
    }
}

Contents of the text file:

BOOST_ROOT
NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS
OS
PROCESSOR_LEVEL

I'm having a hard time figuring out how to remove that pesky little thing. Perhaps there's an easy fix. If someone can help me find a way or remove it or modify the code so it won't load the \\r, I would be very grateful. Thanks.

Answer 1

Windows uses \\r\\n to mark the end of a line of text. *NIX and Macs use different markers. You can see how different systems handle this here .

Instead of handling the splitting of lines manually, I recommend using built-in functionality for doing this (ie File.ReadLines() ):

private void LoadStrTextFromFile(string fileName, ComboBox cb)
{
    if (!File.Exists(fileName))
        return;

    foreach (string line in File.ReadLines(fileName))
        cb.Items.Add(line);
}

Answer 2

My approach

    // remember to use double back slash on the path
    string[] text  = System.IO.File.ReadAllLines("C:\\test.txt").Where(line => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(line)).Distinct().ToArray(); // read the file into a string array with removing the duplicates and empty lines
    comboBox1.Items.AddRange(text); // finally fill in the combobox with the array