Reading particular lines in a text file

Question

I've been having some problems extracting particular lines in a txt file. I'm using the file to store user names for a login program.

The program will know what line to go to in the text file but I don't know how to actually get the wanted line out and put the resulting string into a variable.

Code I'm using to pull file into a variable is:

string usernameFile = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(@"Usernames.txt");

My real problem is that code two lines below doesn't work in my visual studios community version 2017:

File.ReadLine

I don't know if I need to install something else onto my visual studios but any method to be able to read a particular line of a txt file will be fine.

There's no such method as `File.ReadLine()` in the .NET library, so it's not surprising that it doesn't work. — itsme86, Oct 05 '17 at 23:00
Possible duplicate of [How do I read a specified line in a text file?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1262965/how-do-i-read-a-specified-line-in-a-text-file) — Lance U. Matthews, Oct 05 '17 at 23:34

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 05 '17 at 22:50

1

Use File.ReadAllLines instead. That gives you an array of strings, one for each line.

string[] lines = File.ReadAllLines("Usernames.txt");
string username = lines[2]; // or whatever.

answered Oct 05 '17 at 22:50

Blorgbeard

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 05 '17 at 23:02

0

You can use LINQ to avoid reading the entire file:

var line = File.ReadLines("Usernames.txt").Skip(2).First();

answered Oct 05 '17 at 23:02

itsme86

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Reading particular lines in a text file

2 Answers2