Rockford .Net User Group

Here is a simple C# program using LINQ to search an Excel comma-separated file:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

namespace CsvParse1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string name;
            bool found = false;

            Console.Write("Enter name: ");
            name = Console.ReadLine();
            string line;
            StreamReader r = File.OpenText(@"G:\projectdata\Book1.csv");
            do
            {
                line = r.ReadLine();
                if (line != null)
                {
                    var dataline =
                        from d in line.Split(',')
                        where d == name
                        select line;

                    foreach (string s in dataline)
                    {
                        string[] data = s.Split(',');
                        found = true;
                        Console.WriteLine("The e-mail address is {0}", data[1]);
                    }
                }
            } while (line != null);
            if (!found)
                Console.WriteLine("No entry for {0}", name);
        }
    }
}
This program searches the file for a line with a string matching the name given by the user. The data file uses the format

name,e-mail address

I don't know if this code will compile on Visual Studio 2005; I used Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. If I used Split to parse the file into an array of objects, I could have written

var addresses =
     from d in data
     where d.Name == name
     select d.E_MailAddress;

foreach (var a in addresses)
   Console.WriteLine ("Found e-mail address {0}", a);

If you get brave and install the beta, let me know, and tell me what you do with LINQ.

Ross