Text Parsing Tab Delimited file

Question

I have a method that reads a file. This file has roughly 30000 lines. However when I read it into an array I get a random length for my array. I have seen it as low 6000.

I used both

string[] lines = System.IO.File.ReadAllLines(@"C:\\out\\qqqqq.txt");

and

System.IO.StreamReader file = new System.IO.StreamReader(@"C:\\out\\qqqqq.txt");

(and use a counter.)

But I get the same result. I can see in Excel these are too small.

Answer 1

If the line endings in the file are inconsistent (sometimes \\n , sometimes \\r\\n and sometimes \\r ) then you could try reading the entire file as a string and splitting it yourself:

string file = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(@"C:\out\qqqqq.txt");
var lines = file.Split(new[] { '\r', '\n' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

For large files, this is inefficient, because it needs to read the entire file - using StreamReader you would be able to read the file line-by-line as you're processing it. If performance is an issue, then you could write simple tool that first corrects the line endings.