Print all the columns of a DB table, without writing each column name in the print statement

Question

I have a table of students in SQL Server and I want to execute a query like

SELECT * 
FROM tbl_students;

but I don't want to write each column number getValue(0) getValue(1) in C# to get the result,

I wrote in the following statement

Console.WriteLine("{0},\t{1}", sqlDReader.GetValue(0), sqlDReader.GetValue(1));

I just want to get all the column values without writing each column index number, can't we simply get a string of the complete record, preferably with spaces of tabs in between?

`can't we simply get a string of a complete record` you could write a mehtod to do just that — Ňɏssa Pøngjǣrdenlarp, Mar 14 '19 at 23:24
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/681653/can-you-get-the-column-names-from-a-sqldatareader check this — Chetan, Mar 15 '19 at 02:24

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 14 '19 at 23:29

You can. Assuming you are using c#, something like this would work

If you know the number of columns:

string completeLine = "";
for(int i = 0 ; i < numCols ; i++)
{
    completeLine += sqlDReader.GetValue(0).ToString();
    if (i < numCols - 1)
        completeLine += " ";
}
Console.WriteLine (completeLine);

This assumes all columns can be cast to a string. Also assumes you know number of columns. There's a bunch of more complex ways to do this.

To get number of rols you can get the .Columns.Count or similar.

Then have an outer loop, for each row. Note: do not try to do this type of string concatenation on the entire table as it will be slow (since string are really not changeable).

Print all the columns of a DB table, without writing each column name in the print statement

1 Answers1