How to write a file comfortable and easy?

Question

I'm pretty new in developing C#, and my problem is to write a text file. I found some solution with StreamWriter lik this...

StreamWriter file = new StreamWriter("C:\Downloads\test.txt");
file.WriteLine("this is line one");
file.WriteLine("\r\n");
file.WriteLine("this is line 2");
file.Close();

Is there a more comfortable way to write a file? Maybe without the hardcoded "\r\n"?

Answer 1

The simplest approach for writing a multi-line file is File.WriteAllLines:

File.WriteAllLines(@"c:\Downloads\test.txt",
    new[] { "this is line one", "", "", "this is line 2" });

The empty strings are there because in your original code, you'd end with four lines of text... WriteLine already adds a line separator, and you've got one explicitly in the middle call too. If you only want two lines (as per the specified contents) then you should use:

File.WriteAllLines(@"c:\Downloads\test.txt",
    new[] { "this is line one", "this is line 2" });

That will use the platform-default line ending. If you don't want to use that, you could use string.Join to join lines together however you want, then call File.WriteAllText.

All File.* methods dealing with text default to using UTF-8, but allow you to specify the encoding if you want something else.