Reading, splitting, and displaying a multiline CSV file in C#

Question

All,

I\'m trying to write a testbed program that will eventually allow me to take a CSV .txt file and put its contents into a SQLite database file. There are hundreds o

Answer 1

This is how I would do it:

First, define a class to hold the output of your file:

public class MyData
{
    public MyData() { }

    public MyData(string[] values)
    {
        Time = new DateTime(long.Parse(values[0]));
        HlState = int.Parse(values[1]);
        HLX = double.Parse(values[2]);
        HLY = double.Parse(values[3]);
        HLZ = double.Parse(values[4]);
    }

    public DateTime Time { get; set; }
    public int HLState { get; set; }
    public double HLX { get; set; }
    public double HLY { get; set; }
    public double HLZ { get; set; }
}

Then modify you button event to populate a list of those objects

    private void btnLoad_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        Microsoft.Win32.OpenFileDialog dlg = new Microsoft.Win32.OpenFileDialog();
        dlg.FileName = "Document";
        dlg.DefaultExt = ".txt";
        dlg.Filter = "Text Documents (.txt)|*.txt";

        if (dlg.ShowDialog() == true)
        {
            fileName = dlg.FileName;
            OutputConsole.Text = " ";
            OutputConsole.Text = fileName;

            var output = new List<MyData>();

            try
            {
                // First line skipped as we do not need headers.
                foreach (var line in File.ReadAllLines(filename).Skip(1))
                {
                    output.Add(new MyData(line.Split(",")));
                }

                OutputConsole.Text = string.Format("{0} lines read.", output.Lenght);
            }
            catch (System.IO.IOException ex)
            {
                //let user know there was an error reading file
            }

            // Do something with output

        }
    }

Now you have a collection output of objects each with a strong typed access to your values, which should easily populate into a DB

Answer 2

Your file reading code is a bit odd (it has some minor redudance) but I don't think it's the problem. Typically (following the msdn example) the while loop is written as such;

  string line;
  while ((line = sr.ReadLine()) != null) { ... }

Additionally as suggested in the comments you can just used string[] lines = File.ReadAllLines(fileName); and then loop over the lines with your split logic in the middle. I suggest removing EndOfStream from your code and using one of the other two approaches. I don't know that it will fix your problem, but that stands out as something that is not exactly normal.

Also, your output is bad because you're not appending to the text box, you're setting it's value. This means you're only going to see the length of the final line in the file. If you want to see the length of each line it needs to be OutputConsole.Text += lineWords.Length + " "; In case you weren't aware there is an implicit cast done there so there is no need for your explicit cast which just makes the code less readable.