Welcome to another lesson on parsing tables from text files with C#. In today's digital world, data is frequently stored in tabular formats, reminiscent of spreadsheets. Text files provide a straightforward means to store this data when handling simple, organized datasets. Parsing, which involves reading and translating this data into usable formats, is an essential skill for data manipulation.

Imagine scenarios where you need to process configuration files, logs, or other reports exported from systems that store data in text file formats. By the end of this lesson, you will be equipped with the knowledge to parse such data into a structured format, facilitating easy manipulation in C#.

Text files frequently store tabular data using simple delimiters like spaces between values. Consider the following example of a data.txt file:

In this file, each line represents a row in a table, and each value within a line is separated by a space, forming distinct columns. The first line acts as a header, describing the data in the lines that follow.

To effectively parse these lines into a structured format, we'll use a Person class:

The Person class will help us organize the extracted data, allowing us to map each piece of information to the respective properties: Name, Age, and Occupation.

To begin parsing the table data, we first need to read the text file. The File.ReadAllLines method from the System.IO namespace provides an efficient way to accomplish this, allowing us to easily access all lines in the file at once.

In this snippet:

• File.ReadAllLines("data.txt") retrieves all lines from the specified file.
• By applying Skip(1), we exclude the first line, which contains the header, from further processing.

This approach sets a solid foundation for capturing all the rows of data that we need to parse, focusing only on the meaningful data entries.

Once the lines are retrieved, the next move is to convert each line into a list of values, corresponding to the columns.

Explanation:

• var people = new List<Person>() initializes a list to store Person objects.
• line.Split(' ') divides the line into components based on the space delimiter.
• people.Add(new Person { ... }) adds each parsed person to the list.

Lastly, to verify the parsed data, we should print it out in a structured manner.

In this segment, a foreach loop iterates through each Person in the people list, and Console.WriteLine is used to print each person's information.

The output confirms that each Person object is correctly populated with the corresponding data fields:

In this lesson, we've explored the fundamental elements of parsing a table from a text file using C#. The key takeaways include understanding how to:

• Read a text file using File.ReadAllLines.
• Utilize the Split() method to divide lines into components.
• Structure the data using collections like List<Person> in C#.

These skills are crucial for handling straightforward tabular data formats efficiently. As you progress to practice exercises, I encourage you to experiment with different delimiters and file structures to reinforce these concepts. Use these exercises as an opportunity to experiment and solidify your knowledge.