Most efficient way of reading file

Question

I have a file which contains a certain number of fixed length rows having some numbers. I need to read each row in order to get that number and process them and write to a file. Since I need to read each row, as the number of rows increases it becomes time consuming.

Is there an efficient way of reading each row of the file? I'm using C#.

Answer 1

File.ReadLines (.NET 4.0+) is probably the most memory efficient way to do this.

It returns an IEnumerable<string> meaning that lines will get read lazily in a streaming fashion.

Previous versions do not have the streaming option available in this manner, but using StreamReader to read line by line would achieve the same.