Reading a specific line from txt file

Hello.

I have a text file that looks like this:

Code:

---

0        1        "Bull Fighter"                6        100        0        16        20        6        0        28        6        3        0        1        5        400        1600        10        2        130        10        6        0        0        0        0        0
1        1        "Hound"                        9        140        0        22        27        9        0        39        9        3        0        1        5        400        1600        10        2        130        10        6        0        0        0        0        0
2        1        "Budge Dragon"                4        60        0        10        13        3        0        18        3        3        0        1        4        400        2000        10        2        120        10        6        0        0        0        0        0
3        1        "Spider"                2        30        0        4        7        1        0        8        1        2        0        1        5        400        1800        10        2        120        10        6        0        0        0        0        0

---

It is called monster.txt

The first value is a id which I also use in my script.

Lets say I have the id 3, this would be "Spider" since the first number of "Spider" is 3

What is the best way to read the monster.txt file for the id and retrive the name? (Name = "Spider", id = 3) (As my example above)

EDIT:
I just used

Code:

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        private void findMonster(int monsterId)
        {
            StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(@monsterLocation);
            int searchId = monsterId;
            int actualId = 0;
            string name = "(Not found)";
            string[] details = null;
            string line = null;
            while ((line = sr.ReadLine()) != null)
            {
                line = line.Trim();
                if (line == "") continue;
                details = line.Split('\t');
                actualId = int.Parse(details[0]);
                if (actualId == searchId)
                {
                    name = details[2].Replace("\"", "");
                    break;
                }
            }
            sr.Close();
            txtMonster.Text = name;
        }

---

Dont know if its the best way, but it works..

Do you have any control over the format of the file? If you do I would recommend using XML format. Ultimately because it is a text file the whole file is loaded into memory (as far as I know). The advantage of using an XML file is that the System.Xml namespace has some classes that would enable you to search for a particular piece of information from a file. But if you haven't got any control over the format of your monster file or you don't want to learn XML I think your approach is the best way.

If you want really fast access, without doing IO operation all the time (like you do in your solution), I would suggest that you parse only your file once and put it in a dictionary or a similar structure optimized for search. Since you probably doesn't have a lot of data, it can probably stay in memory with no problems.

Nelo suggested to use XML. I think it's a nice idea. Not for searching, but it's more robust than just using 'tabs' and 'return' in a text file and can be automatically parsed into your C# structure without doing any code.