C# Search a file for text

fun.bobby1981

This might seem like me being a complete imbecele but I'm just starting off coding in C# & Im having a bit of trouble with a string search.

Im trying to open a file & search for a string that changes each day in the file. The string is two constant chars followed immediately by 4 variable digits (eg AB1234)

The only way I can think is to use StreamReader to read each char into an array & then search the array until I find the first constant char, then I guess I would start a nested loop to search the following elements to see if they match what Im looking for. But I just cannot seem to figure it out.

Anyone any ideas or code samples that might help me with this?

Thanks

Webmonkey

Regular expressions should help you here.

Ronan_

How much of it have you got done and what type of file is it?

Use streamreader to read all of the text into a string variable.
Then you could try something like .IndexOf("ab") on the string to return the position of the first occurance of the two constant characters and then read the four digits after it.

Ginger

Be far the easiest way to do this is using the Regex.Matches function in C# (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e7sf90t3.aspx) sits in the Namespace System.Text.RegularExpressions. It has 4 overloads such as supplying a Regex Options to do stuff such as ignore case etc (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b49yw9s8.aspx).

Read the file in as a string, and then do a regular expression match to find it. It will return a list of matches that match your criteria . You can then use a simple foreach statement to loop through all the matches if there are any and do what you need.

To read in the file well here is an example http://www.csharp-examples.net/load-text-file-to-string/