.net Text delimited libraries?

Question

Does the .net framework have any builtin assemblies for handling reading and writing from and to text delimited files? Or is this something I have create myself?

Answer 1

I think it is something you'll have to create yourself.
(I did anyway ;) ).

Answer 2

No, it doesn't. You would have to write one yourself... or you could just use something someone else already made. Just google .net csv writer. Here is an example from google code: csv-reader-and-writer

EDIT: I have used the following one before and it worked well: (from knab.ws

public class CsvWriter
{
        public static string WriteToString(DataTable table, bool header, bool quoteall)
        {
                StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
                WriteToStream(writer, table, header, quoteall);
                return writer.ToString();
        }

        public static void WriteToStream(TextWriter stream, DataTable table, bool header, bool quoteall)
        {
                if (header)
                {
                        for (int i = 0; i < table.Columns.Count; i++)
                        {
                                WriteItem(stream, table.Columns[i].Caption, quoteall);
                                if (i < table.Columns.Count - 1)
                                        stream.Write(',');
                                else
                                        stream.Write('\n');
                        }
                }
                foreach (DataRow row in table.Rows)
                {
                        for (int i = 0; i < table.Columns.Count; i++)
                        {
                                WriteItem(stream, row[i], quoteall);
                                if (i < table.Columns.Count - 1)
                                        stream.Write(',');
                                else
                                        stream.Write('\n');
                        }
                }
        }

        private static void WriteItem(TextWriter stream, object item, bool quoteall)
        {
                if (item == null)
                        return;
                string s = item.ToString();
                if (quoteall || s.IndexOfAny("\",\x0A\x0D".ToCharArray()) > -1)
                        stream.Write("\"" + s.Replace("\"", "\"\"") + "\"");
                else
                        stream.Write(s);
        }
}

Answer 3

FileHelpers is the one that is supposedly good at it.

Answer 4

There are no built in CSV readers in .NET for c#, however there are third party libraries available.

• FileHelpers is good for ORM type stuff but no good for arbitrary columns formats, like what Excel can deal with.
• CsvReader on CodeProject is not bad but this is missing some features such as handling fixed length fields and using strings as delimiters.
• Calcite-Csv Library on Google Code. This is my own effort which you might find useful.

Answer 5

There is actually a class called TextFieldParser in Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll that can read CSV files and the likes. I never tried it though.