How to read tab delimited file in c#

CustomDelimiter txtCustomDelimiter. CustomDelimiter; txtCustomDelimiter. Yes chkHeaders. ColumnDefinition; dgvRowView. Empty; txtColWidth. Empty; sdef. TabDelimited; break ; case "Custom Delimited" : sdef. CustomDelimited; txtCustomDelimiter. Text itm. JetDataType Enum. Parse typeof ItemSpecification.

JetDataType , cboDataType. ToInt32 txtColWidth. Add itm ; dgvRowView. ColumnDefinition; bnav. Save ; MessageBox. Show "The schema model has been saved and is now available to the application. Show "If you continue, the existing schema will be overwritten" , "Continue? YesNo, MessageBoxIcon. Empty txtCustomDelimiter. Empty; txtCustomDelimiter. Text sdef. Yes; Properties. No; Properties. Code: About Box frmAbout. The about box code is not important and is not described in this document.

That wraps up the sum of the code needed to drive the CSV Editor application. With the code provided, it is possible construct a viable CSV editor and to build a schema on the fly that may be used to connect to and interact with a delimited text file, regardless of format. While this article was written to demonstrate an approach to working with delimited text files, you might need to connect to only one particular type of delimited text file; the information contained in this document could be used to build a canned scheme.

The download includes examples of each delimited file type comma delimited, tab delimited, fixed width, and custom character in this case pipe delimited with and without headers. The files are named such that you can figure out the delimiter type and whether or not it includes a header row. To open any delimited text file, create a schema definition that works with that file type and save it using the schema definition dialog prior to opening it. Looking at the Schema dialog Schema Generator shown in the following figure, start by setting the delimiter type.

If the delimiter is a custom character, the delimiter text box will enable and you can enter the delimiter there. If the file you are trying to open uses the first row to define the column header, check the box below the delimiter type selection. You can then begin to add rows to the definition.

For each row, enter a column name and a JET data type you can use text for all of the fields if you want to or you can set them to the correct type. If the delimiter type is fixed width; you will also need to set the column width value before adding the column definition to the schema. Once all of the columns have been added, you can save the schema definition using the Save button at the bottom of the dialog.

After saving, when you return to the editor form, you can open any CSV file that matches the schema definition. When a file is opened, the editor code will look at the schema definition and create a schema. View All. We discussed about reading a comma separated values CSV file. How does this approach handle the tab delimited files and fixed length files? Everything lies in the connection string that we provide.

Let us see the details of the connection string here. Provider — This represents the type of database. Data Source — Folder is considered as database. Extended Properties — These properties will define the way we want to read the file. If the format specified is ' Delimited ', the default character is comma ,. It is stored in the registry. As everybody says, do not mess up with the registry. Microsoft provided an alternative to this by providing us the Schema.

If we are reading a FixedLength file, we must use the Schema. We specify the length of the fields in the schema file. If you have multiple files and data needs to be merged or filtered based on the common columns, we do the same way as we do in SQL.

We can join tables and get the merged data. Make sure you filter the data based on the common columns. Note that aliasing SampleFile. CSV As Sample1 is required in join queries, especially when tables have columns with same names.

In our case, table names filenames have dot. Sign in Email. Forgot your password? Search within: Articles Quick Answers Messages. Tagged as VB6. Stats Read Text File txt, csv, log, tab, fixed length.

Pradeep KV Rate me:. Please Sign up or sign in to vote. This article is mainly focused on reading text files efficiently. It includes log, csv, tab delimited, fixed length files, etc. Instead of using StreamReader. NET code - 1. Some of the disadvantages are: Connected environment. Locks the file until the process is complete. We have to split each line separately to get individual columns of data.

It is difficult to handle the rows which have comma as part of its data. Counting the number of records in the file or counting the number of records of a particular type involves reading the whole file.

Read the Data It is as simple as connecting to a database and querying the data from the database table. The steps to read the data are as follows: Open a database connection Note : Connection string is very important here. It varies depending on the type of the file we are trying to read. We will discuss this later in this article. Get the result set using the basic query language. Loop through the records and read the fields.

C Code C. Copy Code. Have been working as a. NET developer for more than 5 years. I have been working on Web Applications for some major banks in United States. I like to upgrade myself with latest technologies in.

NET and also like to work with them. First Prev Next text. Allen Hook Jul Pradeep KV Jul MHKhan Feb Member Dec Daniel Vlasceanu May Gerson Abdala Mar Pradeep KV Mar Pradeep KV Oct NJKotze Sep MatthewRyan Sep Member Jun Mohammad Rahman 4-May The above code has not been compiled, so it may have some errors, but it should get you on the right track.

Please check out articles at CodeProject on how to use it. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow.

Learn more. Asked 11 years, 6 months ago. Active 3 years, 2 months ago. Viewed 57k times. Can anyone help with suggestions? Improve this question. Tim Almond Tim Almond Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Jonathan Allen Jonathan Allen You have to love that general utility classes are in Microsoft.

Could you provide a quick example? Links aren't sufficient answers. If it breaks this response is useless to any googler. I added a link for CSV writing, you can replace some constant strings with your preferred delimiter, and it should be ok. Reading is far more complicated than writing But writing CSV files which contain arbitrary strings is non-trivial. Remember escape sequences! Why would you recommend this over the one that comes with.

UTF8; csvWriter. Wieslaw Olborski Wieslaw Olborski 7 7 bronze badges.