How to know position(linenumber) of a streamreader in a textfile?

Question

an example (that might not be real life, but to make my point) :

public void StreamInfo(StreamReader p)
{
    string info = string.Format(
        "The supplied streamreaer read : {0}\n at line {1}",
        p.ReadLine(),
        p.GetLinePosition()-1);               

}

GetLinePosition here is an imaginary extension method of streamreader. Is this possible?

Of course I could keep count myself but that's not the question.

Answer 1

No, not really possible. The concept of a "line number" is based upon the actual data that's already been read, not just the position. For instance, if you were to Seek() the reader to an arbitrary position, it's not actuall going to read that data, so it wouldn't be able to determine the line number.

The only way to do this is to keep track of it yourself.

Answer 2

No.

Consider that it's possible to seek to any poisition using the underlying stream object (which could be at any point in any line). Now consider what that would do to any count kept by the StreamReader.

Should the StreamReader go and figure out which line it's now on? Should it just keep a number of lines read, regardless of position within the file?

There are more questions than just these that would make this a nightmare to implement, imho.

Answer 3

Here is a guy that implemented a StreamReader with ReadLine() method that registers file position.

http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread35078.html

I guess one should inherit from StreamReader, and then add the extra method to the special class along with some properties (_lineLength + _bytesRead):

 // Reads a line. A line is defined as a sequence of characters followed by
 // a carriage return ('\r'), a line feed ('\n'), or a carriage return
 // immediately followed by a line feed. The resulting string does not
 // contain the terminating carriage return and/or line feed. The returned
 // value is null if the end of the input stream has been reached.
 //
 /// <include file='doc\myStreamReader.uex' path='docs/doc[@for="myStreamReader.ReadLine"]/*' />
 public override String ReadLine()
 {
          _lineLength = 0;
          //if (stream == null)
          //       __Error.ReaderClosed();
          if (charPos == charLen)
          {
                   if (ReadBuffer() == 0) return null;
          }
          StringBuilder sb = null;
          do
          {
                   int i = charPos;
                   do
                   {
                           char ch = charBuffer[i];
                           int EolChars = 0;
                           if (ch == '\r' || ch == '\n')
                           {
                                    EolChars = 1;
                                    String s;
                                    if (sb != null)
                                    {
                                             sb.Append(charBuffer, charPos, i - charPos);
                                             s = sb.ToString();
                                    }
                                    else
                                    {
                                             s = new String(charBuffer, charPos, i - charPos);
                                    }
                                    charPos = i + 1;
                                    if (ch == '\r' && (charPos < charLen || ReadBuffer() > 0))
                                    {
                                             if (charBuffer[charPos] == '\n')
                                             {
                                                      charPos++;
                                                      EolChars = 2;
                                             }
                                    }
                                    _lineLength = s.Length + EolChars;
                                    _bytesRead = _bytesRead + _lineLength;
                                    return s;
                           }
                           i++;
                   } while (i < charLen);
                   i = charLen - charPos;
                   if (sb == null) sb = new StringBuilder(i + 80);
                   sb.Append(charBuffer, charPos, i);
          } while (ReadBuffer() > 0);
          string ss = sb.ToString();
          _lineLength = ss.Length;
          _bytesRead = _bytesRead + _lineLength;
          return ss;
 }

Think there is a minor bug in the code as the length of the string is used to calculate file position instead of using the actual bytes read (Lacking support for UTF8 and UTF16 encoded files).