This chapter is about working with text files.
In a previous chapter, we looked at web data stored in a database.
Your web site may also have data stored in text files.
Text files used to store data is often called flat files. Common text file formats are .txt, .xml, and .csv (comma-delimited values).
In this chapter you will learn:
In the example to follow, you will need a text file to work with.
On your web site, if you don't have an App_Data folder, create one. In the App_Data folder, create a new file named Persons.txt.
Add the following content to the file:
The example below shows how to display data from a text file:
Server.MapPath finds the exact text file path.
File.ReadAllLines opens the text file and reads all lines from the file into an array.
For each dataItem in each dataline of the array the data is displayed.
With Microsoft Excel, you can save a spreadsheet as a comma-delimited text file (.csv file). When you do so, each row in the spreadsheet is saved as a text line, and each data column is separated by a comma.
You can use the example above to read an Excel .csv file (just change the file name to the name of the Excel file).
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