C# : How to read a text file

This is a very basic example where we explain how can we read text files from C#.

We will show three examples:

Example 1:

We will read all the text from a file and store it in a string variable.

For this we will be using C# inbuilt utility function: System.IO.File.ReadAllText

Method signature:

public static string ReadAllText(string path);

Example 2:

We will read all the text from a file line by line and then store each line as an element in a string array.

For this we will be using C# inbuilt utility function: System.IO.File.ReadAllLines

Method signature:

public static string[] ReadAllLines(string path);

We have developed a console application to showcase the feature.The source code for reading file is displayed below:

class Program

    {

        static void Main()

        {

           

            // Read the file as one string.

            string text = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(@"C:\Example1.txt");

            // Display the file contents to the console. Variable text is a string.

            System.Console.WriteLine("*****************EXAMPLE 1*********************");

            System.Console.WriteLine("Contents of Example1.txt = {0} \n \n", text);