Is ther a way to place the keys and values in a hashtable in order?

[fiaolle]

Hi

I want to place the keys and values in a hashtable in order, but they seem to place as they want.

I have the code

FileStream fs1 = new FileStream(file, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, System.IO.FileShare.ReadWrite);
StreamReader testTxt = new StreamReader(fs1);
string allRead = testTxt.ReadToEnd(); //Reads the whole text file to the end
Hashtable test = new Hashtable();
int tal = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < allRead.Length; i++)
{

if (char.GetNumericValue(allRead[i]) <= 127 && char.GetNumericValue(allRead[i])>=0)
{
//tal++;
test.Add(i,allRead[i].ToString( ));
//test.Add(tal,allRead[i].ToString( ));
}
}

In the hashtable test the keys and values are not placed in order. And when I use Add with "tal" it places the keys and values before each other.
Is there away to place them in order with "i" and "tal"?

And a nother question I'm using this code to see if the file contains ordninary characters and I thought that if that "tal" is almost the same size as allRead.Length it would be a text file. But it doesnt work that either.

Can anyone help me with both the question.

Many thanks
Fia

[Mutant_Fruit]

There is a way - use a List<string> instead. Dictionary and Hashtable types are *not* sorted. They are optimised to have ultra-fast lookups and so store the keys in a special way which you cannot really affect. What are you trying to accomplish anyway?

[fiaolle]

Hi

Thanks for your answer.
I want to search for words in text files (.doc, .txt)
I'm trying to see if a file contains valid characters (a-ö, A-Ö, 0-9) and some characters like ".", "," and so on. I thought if I counted these characters and they are almost as many and the length of allRead it would be a text file.

I have files ( .doc) that I have scanned pictures to and if I for example search after "is" it can find that in the document with the scanned picture. When I open the document the file doesn't contain the word "is".

Hope you undertstand what I mean and can help me

Thanks
Fia