C# Input/Output Classes Simplified

by Budi Kurniawan
08/05/2002

Beginners to the .NET Framework sometimes have a hard time trying to understand the classes in the System.IO namespace for performing input/output (IO) operations. The difficulty stems from the fact that this namespace is relatively large, containing more than 40 members, some of which are similar classes that can be used to achieve the same tasks. Thus it is sometimes hard to figure out which class is best for which task. This article tries to make your life a bit easier by grouping IO tasks into three categories and introducing the classes that are suitable for each task category.

Input/output (IO) refers to the operations for reading and writing data to streams and files. In the .NET Framework, you use the classes in the System.IO namespace to perform these operations. This article starts with the basic classes such as the File and FileInfo classes -- classes used to perform file operations such as creating, copying, and deleting files. Other basic classes include Directory and DirectoryInfo, which provide functionality to manipulate directories, and Path, which supports application portability. In addition to those classes, there are also classes you can use to read and write the contents of a file. The System.IO namespace provides a number of classes that allow you to do basically similar things. These classes can be roughly grouped into three categories:

Related Reading C# in a Nutshell By Peter Drayton, Ben Albahari, Ted Neward

• Classes for reading and writing bytes.
• Classes for reading and writing characters.
• Classes for reading and writing binary data.

In the first group are stream classes that are derived from the Stream class. In the second category are reader and writer classes, such as StreamReader and StreamBuffer. The third group includes classes such as BinaryReader and BinaryWriter. Which class you should use for your input and output operations will depend on the kind of data you are going to work with.

The File Class

You use the File class to manipulate a file; to create, copy, or delete it, and check if it exists. You also use it to open a file for reading and writing. To read from and write to a file itself, however, you need to use other classes, such as the FileStream or the BufferedStream class. The File class constructor is private, so you cannot instantiate a file using the new keyword. This is not necessary because all methods of the File class are static. These static methods perform security checks every time they are called. This, of course, has performance consequences, and sometimes is not needed. If you need to access the same file frequently, use the FileInfo class instead. The following is the list of the most important methods of the File class:

Create

Creates a file in a specified directory. You call this method passing a file path or a file path and an integer of a buffer size for the resulting FileStream object. For example, the following code creates a file called newFile.txt in the C:\data directory, returns a FileStream, and then closes the FileStream object straight away:

FileStream fs = File.Create("C:/data/newFile.txt");
fs.Close();

For more information on the FileStream class, see the section "The FileStream Class" later in this article. As another example, the following code creates a FileStream with a buffer size of 16KB.

FileStream fs = File.Create("
     C:/123data/newFile.txt", 16384);

If the file c:\data\newfile.txt already exists, it will be overwritten.

CreateText

Creates a file and returns a StreamWriter object that you can use to write text into that file. Like Create, you pass a file path to the method, and any existing file will be overwritten. For example:

StreamWriter sw = File.CreateText("
     C:/123data/new.txt");

See the "The StreamWriter Class" section later in this article for more details on StreamWriter.

AppendText

Returns a StreamWriter object to a specified existing file. The text you write will then be appended to the end of the file. If the file does not exist, AppendText will create a new file. You pass a file path to this method.

Exists

Returns true if a file in a specified path exists; otherwise, it returns false. Its only parameter is a path and filename.

Copy

Copies a file to another folder. There are two overloads of this method, as follows:

public static void Copy(
  string sourceFileName,
  string destFileName
);
public static void Copy(
  string sourceFileName,
  string destFileName,
  bool overwrite
);

The first overload of the method will throw an IOException if the destination file already exists. So will the second overload, if the overwrite argument is false. For both overloads, a FileNotFoundException will be thrown if the source file does not exist. In addition, the method can throw an ArgumentException if either sourceFilename or destinationFilename is invalid.

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