Streaming From Text Files to XML

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Quite some time ago, I wrote a blog post on how you can stream text files as input into LINQ queries by writing an extension method that yields lines using the yield return statement.

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Blog TOCYou then can write a LINQ query that processes the text file in a lazy deferred fashion. If you then use the T:System.Xml.Linq.XStreamingElement to stream output, you then can create a transform from the text file to XML that uses a minimal amount of memory, regardless of the size of the source text file. You can transform a million records, and your working set will be very small.

The following text file, People.txt, is the source for this example.

#This is a comment
1,Tai,Yee,Writer
2,Nikolay,Grachev,Programmer
3,David,Wright,Inventor

The following code contains an extension method that streams the lines of the text file in a deferred fashion.

public static class StreamReaderExtension
{
public static IEnumerable<string> Lines(this StreamReader source)
{
String line;
if (source == null)
throw new ArgumentNullException("source");
while ((line = source.ReadLine()) != null)
yield return line;
}
}
class Program
{
static void <_st13a_place _w3a_st="on">Main<_st13a_place><_st13a_place><_st13a_place />(string[] args)
{
using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader("People.txt"))
{
XStreamingElement xmlTree = new XStreamingElement("Root",
from line in sr.Lines()
let items = line.Split(',')
where !line.StartsWith("#")
select new XElement("Person",
new XAttribute("ID", items[0]),
new XElement("First", items[1]),
new XElement("Last", items[2]),
new XElement("Occupation", items[3])
)
);
Console.WriteLine(xmlTree);
}
}

}

This example produces the following output:

<Root>
<Person ID="1">
<First>Tai</First>
<Last>Yee</Last>
<Occupation>Writer</Occupation>
</Person>
<Person ID="2">
<First>Nikolay</First>
<Last>Grachev</Last>
<Occupation>Programmer</Occupation>
</Person>
<Person ID="3">
<First>David</First>
<Last>Wright</Last>
<Occupation>Inventor</Occupation>
</Person>
</Root>