How to Read a File to String in C#

1. Read a File to String With the File.ReadAllText() Method in C#
2. Read a File to String With the StreamReader.ReadToEnd() Method in C#

This tutorial will discuss the methods to read all the contents of a file to a string variable in C#.

Read a File to String With the File.ReadAllText() Method in C#

The File class provides many functions to interact with the files in C#. The [File.ReadAllText() method](File.ReadAllText Method (System.IO) | Microsoft Docs) in C# reads all the contents of a file. The File.ReadAllText() method takes the file’s path as an argument and returns the contents of the specified file in a string variable. See the following example code.

using System;
using System.IO;

namespace read_file_to_string {
  class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
      string text = File.ReadAllText(@"C:\File\file.txt");
      Console.WriteLine(text);
    }
  }
}

Output:

this is all the text in this file

In the above code, we read all the contents of the file file.txt inside the path C:\File\ into the string variable text with the File.ReadAllText() method in C#.

Read a File to String With the StreamReader.ReadToEnd() Method in C#

The StreamReader class reads the content from a byte stream with a particular encoding in C#. The StreamReader.ReadToEnd() method is used to read all the contents of a file in C#. The StreamReader.ReadToEnd() method returns the contents of the specified file in a string variable. See the following example code.

using System;
using System.IO;

namespace read_file_to_string {
  class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
      StreamReader fileReader = new StreamReader(@"C:\File\file.txt");
      string text = fileReader.ReadToEnd();
      Console.WriteLine(text);
    }
  }
}

Output:

this is all the text in this file

In the above code, we read all the contents of the file file.txt inside the path C:\File\ into the string variable text with the StreamReader.ReadToEnd() method in C#. This approach is much faster than the previous approach.