Saving from List<T> to txt

Question

I want my program to read from two text files into one List<T>. The List<T> is sorting and cleaning duplicates.

I want the List<T> to save (after sorting and cleaning) to a txt file.

But when I looked in the result txt file, I found this message:

System.Collections.Generic.List`1[System.String]

Does anyone have an idea how I could fix this error?

Here is my code:

using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.IO;  namespace Uniqpass {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {              String pfad = "C:\\Dokumente und Einstellungen\\Bektas\\Desktop\\test\\";             String pfad2 = "C:\\Dokumente und Einstellungen\\Bektas\\Desktop\\test\\";             String speichern = "C:\\Dokumente und Einstellungen\\Bektas\\Desktop\\test\\ausgabe.txt";             String datei = "text1.txt";             String datei2 = "text2.txt";              try             {                  //Einlesen TxT 1                 List<String> pass1 = new List<String>();                 StreamReader sr1 = new StreamReader(pfad + datei);                 while (sr1.Peek() > -1)                 {                      pass1.Add(sr1.ReadLine());                 }                 sr1.Close();                 //Einlesen TxT 2                 StreamReader sr2 = new StreamReader(pfad2 + datei2);                 while (sr2.Peek() > -1)                 {                     pass1.Add(sr2.ReadLine());                 }                 sr2.Close();                  List<String> ausgabeListe = pass1.Distinct().ToList();                 ausgabeListe.Sort();                  ausgabeListe.ForEach(Console.WriteLine);                  StreamWriter file = new System.IO.StreamWriter(speichern);                 file.WriteLine(ausgabeListe);                 file.Close();               }             catch (Exception)             {                 Console.WriteLine("Error");             }              Console.ReadKey();         }     } } 

Answer 1

There's a handy little method File.WriteAllLines -- no need to open a StreamWriter yourself:

In .net 4:

File.WriteAllLines(speichern, ausgabeListe); 

In .net 3.5:

File.WriteAllLines(speichern, ausgabeListe.ToArray()); 

Likewise, you could replace your reading logic with File.ReadAllLines, which returns an array of strings (use ToList() on that if you want a List<string>).

So, in fact, your complete code could be reduced to:

// Input List<String> data = File.ReadAllLines(pfad + datei)     .Concat(File.ReadAllLines(pfad2 + datei2))     .Distinct().ToList();  // Processing data.Sort();   // Output data.ForEach(Console.WriteLine);  File.WriteAllLines(speichern, data);