Applying Style to Plain Text
Dynamically
Introduction:
There are lot of situations when
you have a plain text file and you want to apply certain styles to text and
display to the user. In this small example we will take a look at the exam
questions file which will contain few questions and we will apply styles to that
plain file and display it to the user.
Plain Text File:
Here is the simple text file which
consists of questions:
| 1) What is your
name?
a) AzamSharp
*b) Mohammad Azam
c) Azim
d) Aziz
2) What is your pet name?
a) chitta
b) bonco
*c) coco
d) billi
3) What is your city?
a) Houston
b) Austin
*c) Boston
d) San antonio
|
The correct answer are represented by '*'
following the choices. We will assume that user has given the test and he wants
to see the correct answers after the test.
Applying HTML Tags to Plain Text File:
I have created a small class SharpFormat.cs
which will apply the styles to the plain text. The complete code for the class
is given below:
|
using System;
using
System.Data;
using
System.Configuration;
using
System.Web;
using
System.Web.Security;
using
System.Web.UI;
using
System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using
System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using
System.IO;
using
System.Text;
public
class
SharpFormat
{
public
const
string TABLE_BEGIN_TAG
= @"<table name=""myTable""
border=""2"">";
public
const
string TABLE_END_TAG =
@"</table>";
public
const
string TR_OPEN_TAG =
@"<tr><td>";
public
const
string TR_CLOSE_TAG =
@"</td></tr>";
public
const
string
TR_OPEN_TAG_COLOR = @"<tr bgcolor=""green""><td>";
public
SharpFormat()
{
}
// This method
formats the text and sends back the formatted text
public
static
string FormatText(string
fileName)
{
FileStream
fileStream = File.OpenRead(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(fileName));
StreamReader reader =
new
StreamReader(fileStream);
string
nextLine = null;
StringBuilder sb =
new
StringBuilder();
try
{
// Add the Table
beginning tag
sb.Append(TABLE_BEGIN_TAG);
while
(reader.Peek() > -1)
{
nextLine = reader.ReadLine();
if
(nextLine.StartsWith("*"))
// *
means answer
{
sb.Append(TR_OPEN_TAG_COLOR);
sb.Append(nextLine);
sb.Append(TR_CLOSE_TAG);
}
else
{
sb.Append(TR_OPEN_TAG);
sb.Append(nextLine);
sb.Append(TR_CLOSE_TAG);
}
}
}
finally
{
reader.Close();
fileStream.Close();
}
sb.Append(TABLE_END_TAG);
return
sb.ToString();
}
}
|
As you can see in the code above that all I am
doing is attaching the correct HTML tags at the right time. I am using
StringBuilder object to increase performance as using string concatenation will
be a bad idea since strings are immutable. I read the text line by line from the
file. If I found '*' that means its an answer and I apply different color to the
particular row.
The output after applying the styles will look
like the screenshot below:
As you can see the screen shot above its looks
much better than displaying plain text to user with '*' representing the answer.
I hope you liked the article, happy coding!