Parse log file and get matching data

Question

From the big log file (about like 2532910 lines), the lines that I am looking for are very few (like 10 or 12). What is the best way to match and read these lines? My code is in c#. Is there a way a reader/stream can read only a pattern matching data?

Thanks

Answer 1

This may be a duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/994382/filtering-streams-in-c. Useful info there, anyway.

Answer 2

No but you can read the stream line by line and use RegEx to find matching lines

Answer 3

to read such a big files the best way is to use streamReader.ReadLine()

just like this:

StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(@"path_to_log");

int lineNum = 1;
const int searchingLineNum = 10;
string line = string.Empty;

while (sr.Peek() != -1)
{
    line = sr.ReadLine();

    if (lineNum == searchingLineNum)
    {
        break;
    }
    lineNum++;
}

Console.WriteLine(line); // do what you want with this line (parse using Regex)