Saving from List<T> to txt

Question

I want my program to read from two text files into one List<T>. The List<T> is sorting and cleaning duplicates.

I want the List<T> to save (after sorting and cleaning) to a txt file.

But when I looked in the result txt file, I found this message:

System.Collections.Generic.List`1[System.String]

Does anyone have an idea how I could fix this error?

Here is my code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

namespace Uniqpass
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {

            String pfad = "C:\\Dokumente und Einstellungen\\Bektas\\Desktop\\test\\";
            String pfad2 = "C:\\Dokumente und Einstellungen\\Bektas\\Desktop\\test\\";
            String speichern = "C:\\Dokumente und Einstellungen\\Bektas\\Desktop\\test\\ausgabe.txt";
            String datei = "text1.txt";
            String datei2 = "text2.txt";

            try
            {

                //Einlesen TxT 1
                List<String> pass1 = new List<String>();
                StreamReader sr1 = new StreamReader(pfad + datei);
                while (sr1.Peek() > -1)
                {

                    pass1.Add(sr1.ReadLine());
                }
                sr1.Close();
                //Einlesen TxT 2
                StreamReader sr2 = new StreamReader(pfad2 + datei2);
                while (sr2.Peek() > -1)
                {
                    pass1.Add(sr2.ReadLine());
                }
                sr2.Close();

                List<String> ausgabeListe = pass1.Distinct().ToList();
                ausgabeListe.Sort();

                ausgabeListe.ForEach(Console.WriteLine);

                StreamWriter file = new System.IO.StreamWriter(speichern);
                file.WriteLine(ausgabeListe);
                file.Close();


            }
            catch (Exception)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Error");
            }

            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

There's a handy little method File.WriteAllLines -- no need to open a StreamWriter yourself:

In .net 4:

File.WriteAllLines(speichern, ausgabeListe);

In .net 3.5:

File.WriteAllLines(speichern, ausgabeListe.ToArray());

Likewise, you could replace your reading logic with File.ReadAllLines, which returns an array of strings (use ToList() on that if you want a List<string>).

So, in fact, your complete code could be reduced to:

// Input
List<String> data = File.ReadAllLines(pfad + datei)
    .Concat(File.ReadAllLines(pfad2 + datei2))
    .Distinct().ToList();

// Processing
data.Sort(); 

// Output
data.ForEach(Console.WriteLine); 
File.WriteAllLines(speichern, data);