Reading a text file and pulling out specific columns

What i need to do is read a specific text file and pull out the entire column based on a string.

So if my string was parkingfee I would pull out whatever column in my | delimited file that header row matched the word parking开发者_JAVA技巧fee

This should do the trick for you. To do what you'd want, you could do this:

foreach(string val in GetColumnValues(fileName, "parkingfee", "|")
{
    ...
}

Here's the function:

public static IEnumerable<string> GetColumnValues(string fileName, string columnName, string delimiter)
{
    using (System.IO.StreamReader reader = new System.IO.StreamReader(fileName))
    {
        string[] delim = new string[] { delimiter };

        string[] columns = reader.ReadLine().Split(delim, StringSplitOptions.None);

        int column = -1;

        for (int i = 0; i < columns.Length; i++)
        {
            if (string.Compare(columns[i], columnName, true) == 0)
            {
                column = i;
                break;
            }
        }

        if (column == -1) throw new ArgumentException("The specified column could not be found.");

        while (reader.BaseStream.Position < reader.BaseStream.Length)
        {
            string[] line = reader.ReadLine().Split(delim, StringSplitOptions.None);

            if (line.Length > column) yield return line[column];
        }
    }
}