HOW DO YOU EDIT A TEXT FILE?

Question

i cannot find this, all i want to do is make a form program that will edit a portion of text within a txt file, i have no idea how to reference the text file or what commands would be used to edit it

Alan · Answer

The easiest way is to read the whole file, make the changes to the text and then write it all back, overwriting the original file. Here's an example. Suppose you have this textfile, salfile.txt, and you want to interchange the second and fourth lines: First Fourth Third Second This console program (.NET 2.0) should achieve this: using System; using System.IO; using System.Collections.Generic; class Test { static void Main() { string line = null; List lines = new List (); StreamReader reader = new StreamReader("salfile.txt"); // read all the lines in the file and store them in the List while((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null) { lines.Add(line); } reader.Close(); // change the second line lines[1] = "Second"; // change the fourth line lines[3] = "Fourth"; StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter("salfile.txt"); // write the lines back to the file, overwriting the original one for (int i = 0; i { if (i Console.WriteLine(lines[i]); else Console.Write(lines[i]); } writer.Close(); // check it worked reader = new StreamReader("salfile.txt"); while((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null) { Console.WriteLine(line); } reader.Close(); Console.WriteLine("

Press any key to end the program"); Console.ReadKey(); } }

HOW DO YOU EDIT A TEXT FILE?

Answers (1)