Reading a specific line from txt file

[Dumpen]

Hello.

I have a text file that looks like this:

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

        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..

[nelo]

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.

[angedelamort]

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.