Problem Parsing Text with BinaryReader

Unity Engine
1

Hello. I’m having a problem trying to parse a file using BinaryReader. Specifically, when I try to use ReadInt32(), it reads in “too much.”

My file (midi event data) is formatted where each line is a series of integers and strings like so:

0 0 non 49 127 0
2880 2880 noff 49 0 0

Each field is delimited by a tab. Problem is, ReadInt32() reads in 4 bytes or, in the case of the first line: 0 (space) 0 (space). I’ve done file parsing before, and it seemed to recognize the white space and only give me the 0 when I try to read in an integer. Can anyone provide help here? Thanks in advance.

2

Is the file you’re reading and ASCII file? If it is (which it look like) you might want to try a StreamReader as BinaryReader is more for binary files.

Just read a line, split it on the tabs, and use Int32.Parse() to convert it.

3

Thanks for the response! I’ve also tried StreamReader, but the problem is that each integer can be of variable characters long, and to my knowledge, StreamReader only supplies a Read() member which will grab the next character only, or you can supply it a number of chars to grab.

I suppose I could use the Peek() function until I get to a tab, then I would know the number of chars to read in…is this the best way to do this?

4

You can use ReadLine() to read until the end of the line. You can then parse the string like this,

using(StreamReader sr = new StreamReader("File.txt"))
{
  string line;
  while( (line = sr.ReadLine()) != null )
  {
    string[] list = line.Split( new Char[]{'\t'} );
    int value1 = Int32.Parse(list[0]);
    int value2 = Int32.Parse(list[1]);
    ...
  }
}
5

You are my personal savior…it worked brilliantly. Thank you so much for your help.

6

How can you change the code to only read a specific line in the text file?

I see currently it does a full read not just a specific line in the file.

Just wondering.

Great resource on the forum!

Thanks again for post the reply to this post.