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Can .NET load and parse a properties file equivalent to Java Properties class?

Asked 2009-01-27T22:36:17.263
68

Is there an easy way in C# to read a properties file that has each property on a separate line followed by an equals sign and the value, such as the following:

ServerName=prod-srv1
Port=8888
CustomProperty=Any value

In Java, the Properties class handles this parsing easily:

Properties myProperties=new Properties();
FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream (new File("CustomProps.properties"));
myProperties.load(fis);
System.out.println(myProperties.getProperty("ServerName"));
System.out.println(myProperties.getProperty("CustomProperty"));

I can easily load the file in C# and parse each line, but is there a built in way to easily get a property without having to parse out the key name and equals sign myself? The C# information I have found seems to always favor XML, but this is an existing file that I don't control and I would prefer to keep it in the existing format as it will require more time to get another team to change it to XML than parsing the existing file.

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1 Answer

3

Yeah there's no built in classes to do this that I'm aware of.

But that shouldn't really be an issue should it? It looks easy enough to parse just by storing the result of Stream.ReadToEnd() in a string, splitting based on new lines and then splitting each record on the = character. What you'd be left with is a bunch of key value pairs which you can easily toss into a dictionary.

Here's an example that might work for you:

public static Dictionary<string, string> GetProperties(string path)
{
    string fileData = "";
    using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(path))
    {
        fileData = sr.ReadToEnd().Replace("\r", "");
    }
    Dictionary<string, string> Properties = new Dictionary<string, string>();
    string[] kvp;
    string[] records = fileData.Split("\n".ToCharArray());
    foreach (string record in records)
    {
        kvp = record.Split("=".ToCharArray());
        Properties.Add(kvp[0], kvp[1]);
    }
    return Properties;
}

Here's an example of how to use it:

Dictionary<string,string> Properties = GetProperties("data.txt");
Console.WriteLine("Hello: " + Properties["Hello"]);
Console.ReadKey();
answered 2009-01-27T22:50:41.837

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