How to read a file into a string with CR/LF preserved?

Question

If I asked the question "how to read a file into a string" the answer would be obvious. However -- here is the catch with CR/LF preserved.

The problem is, File.ReadAllText strips those characters. StreamReader.ReadToEnd just converted LF into CR for me which led to long investigation where I have bug in pretty obvious code ;-)

So, in short, if I have file containing foo\n\r\nbar I would like to get foo\n\r\nbar (i.e. exactly the same content), not foo bar, foobar, or foo\n\n\nbar. Is there some ready to use way in .Net space?

The outcome should be always single string, containing entire file.

Answer 1

Are you sure that those methods are the culprits that are stripping out your characters?

I tried to write up a quick test; StreamReader.ReadToEnd preserves all newline characters.

string str = "foo\n\r\nbar";
using (Stream ms = new MemoryStream(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(str)))
using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(ms, Encoding.UTF8))
{
    string str2 = sr.ReadToEnd();
    Console.WriteLine(string.Join(",", str2.Select(c => ((int)c))));
}

// Output: 102,111,111,10,13,10,98,97,114
//           f   o   o \n \r \n  b  a   r

An identical result is achieved when writing to and reading from a temporary file:

string str = "foo\n\r\nbar";
string temp = Path.GetTempFileName();
File.WriteAllText(temp, str);
string str2 = File.ReadAllText(temp);
Console.WriteLine(string.Join(",", str2.Select(c => ((int)c))));

It appears that your newlines are getting lost elsewhere.