Read text from file given specific indexes

Question

I have a file with some text content. e.g. file name = RandomText.txt

string content = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit";

I want to be able to extract content given specific indexes e.g. get text from index 5 to index 10

which should return "ipsum"

Here are my attempt, which isnt doing exctly what i want..

int minRange = 1
int maxRange = 10;
int randomIndex = rnd.Next(minRange, maxRange);
string text = File.ReadLines(RandomText.txt).Skip(randomIndex).First();

(I think skip() in here used for lines rather than indexes, which isnt what i want really..)

any ideas?

please post more information about the content of the file. do you have linebreaks in it? — Mong Zhu, May 18 '17 at 14:05
If your start-index is 5 you start with the space, so the result will be: `" ipsu"` — Tim Schmelter, May 18 '17 at 14:14

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 18 '17 at 14:10

File.ReadLines(RandomText.txt).Skip( would skip a number of lines not a number of characters. Basically you could use the method System.IO.File.ReadAllText. It will return the entire file content as one string. Now you can take a substring from a certain start index with a certain length

int minRange = 1
int maxRange = 10;
Random rnd = new Random(DateTime.Now.Millisecond);
int randomIndexStart = rnd.Next(minRange, maxRange);
int randomIndexLength = rnd.Next(minRange, maxRange);


string part = File.ReadAllText(@"C:\temp\read.txt").Substring(randomIndexStart, randomIndexLength);

Read text from file given specific indexes

1 Answers1