How best to program a 'field colorer' program - quite easy!

Sorry for the weird title, I could't think of anything better!

Anyways, I'm half way through writing a program (Windows Forms App) that reads in a fixed-width file, gathers field lengths from user input, then it's supposed to display each column from the first line of the file in a different color... Do you know what I mean? It's basically to differentiate between the different fields in a fixed-width file using color.

What I wanted to ask was what was the best way to go about this? Because I'm having a lot of trouble, and I keep running into things and just implementing disgusting solutions when I know there is a much better one.

Obviously you don'开发者_JAVA百科t have to give me a whole program, just some ideas of better ways to go about this - because my solution is just horrendous.

Thank you all in advance!

I would use a RichTextBox. This has an easy way to change the color of text. Here is an example where I have 3 inputs from the user that tells how wide each column should be. Then it reads in a file and colors the widths appropriately. Hopefully this will give you some more ideas.

public partial class Form1 : Form
{
  public Form1()
  {
     InitializeComponent();
     ReadFile();
  }

  private void ReadFile()
  {
     // Assumes there are 3 columns (and 3 input values from the user)
     string[] lines_in_file = File.ReadAllLines(@"C:\Temp\FixedWidth.txt");
     foreach (string line in lines_in_file)
     {
        int offset = 0;
        int column_width = (int)ColumnWidth1NumericUpDown.Value;
        // Set the color for the first column
        richTextBox1.SelectionColor = Color.Khaki;
        richTextBox1.AppendText(line.Substring(offset, column_width));
        offset += column_width;

        column_width = (int)ColumnWidth2NumericUpDown.Value;
        // Set the color for the second column
        richTextBox1.SelectionColor = Color.HotPink;
        richTextBox1.AppendText(line.Substring(offset, column_width));
        offset += column_width;

        column_width = (int)ColumnWidth3NumericUpDown.Value;
        // Make sure we dont try to substring incorrectly
        column_width = (line.Length - offset < column_width) ?
            line.Length - offset : column_width; 
        // Set the color for the third column
        richTextBox1.SelectionColor = Color.MediumSeaGreen;
        richTextBox1.AppendText(line.Substring(offset, column_width));

        // Add newline
        richTextBox1.AppendText(Environment.NewLine);
     }
  }
}