Saving and reading from specific parts of a .txt file

Question

Aspiring programmer here!

You can skip this part if you find it irrelevant.

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Im currently working on a project where i give every program a username and i let people edit their own part of of each file. This will work more or less like onenote (great program), but i want to be able to restrict access to certian parts of it. I also need the file to be stored locally (on a shared location that is). In time i also want the files to be encrypted, but ill stick with the editing part of my question for now.

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So my real problem: I need people to be able to edit their part of a .txt file. The setup will probably look like this:

Document name:

Task 1: (Task name, like "Write a paragraph about Einstein"

User 1: (User 1s answer)

User 2: (User 2s answer and etc.)

Then ill follow up with more tasks / users. What i need to make my program understand is to read-only document name and other users answer, and read-write on their own part of the file.

What code can i use to accomplish this?

Answer 1

You won't be able to do that in a text file. You'll have to spend a little bit more effort in solving that task. Use a database and manage those tasks in a table and the user responses in another table. That will shurely work much better, trust me.

Answer 2

If you really want to use a text based solution for this instead of a database I would look into XML files.

They give you the ability to structure a document and have capabilities of being queried by C# trough XPath or Linq to XML queries.

This documentation should get you started.