Need to write many customer records to a single line in text file

Question

I have a client that wants a text file with all the text on a single line. Like an EDI file has.

I have a datatable with thousands of customers and customer information. My method loops through the datatable grabs the customer info and writes it to a text file. Each line in the text file has information for one customer. There are thousands of customers, which means thousands of lines in the text file.

I don't know how to put all the customers on one single line in the text file. If anybody has some suggestions I would appreciate it.

Answer 1

Instead of using WriteLine to write each customer, you can use Write (which won't add the new line), and also Write some delimiter (space, tab, etc) between each customer.

Answer 2

Say I have some array of strings ( string[] ) with all the names, it could really be any collection implementing IEnumerable<T> just do;

 string OneBigLine = String.Join(MyDelimiter, myStringArray);
 File.WriteAllText(OneBigLine);

Or to make it all one line;

File.WriteAllText(String.Join(MyDelimiter, myStringArray));

Answer 3

If you already have the file opened, you can append more customers with your StreamWriter Write method, instead of the classic WriteLine.

using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter("file.txt"))
{
    foreach (Customer customer in customers)
    {
        sw.Write(customer.Name);
    }    
}

If you need to open the file each time, you can use the overload of StreamWriter that appends new text instead of overwriting it.

using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter("file.txt", true))
{
    sw.Write(customer.Name);  
}

You will also need to add a delimiter manually if you need one.

Answer 4

Thanks everyone for your answers. However, I went with the following. The writeline has a default return carriage line feed characters like this. \r\n

I adjusted the Newline property to a blank string like this sw.NewLine = "";.

sw is my streamwriter. This does exactly what I wanted. Instead of adding new rows, it just creates one very long row.