This is how I did it with a large (50 GB) file:
I tried 2 different ways: the first, reading the file into memory and using Regex Replace or String Replace. Then I appended the entire string to a temporary file.
The first method works well for a few Regex replacements, but Regex.Replace or String.Replace could cause out of memory error if you do many replaces in a large file.
The second is by reading the temp file line by line and manually building each line using StringBuilder and appending each processed line to the result file. This method was pretty fast.
static void ProcessLargeFile()
{
if (File.Exists(outFileName)) File.Delete(outFileName);
string text = File.ReadAllText(inputFileName, Encoding.UTF8);
// EX 1 This opens entire file in memory and uses Replace and Regex Replace --> might cause out of memory error
text = text.Replace("</text>", "");
text = Regex.Replace(text, @"\<ref.*?\</ref\>", "");
File.WriteAllText(outFileName, text);
// EX 2 This reads file line by line
if (File.Exists(outFileName)) File.Delete(outFileName);
using (var sw = new StreamWriter(outFileName))
using (var fs = File.OpenRead(inFileName))
using (var sr = new StreamReader(fs, Encoding.UTF8)) //use UTF8 encoding or whatever encoding your file uses
{
string line, newLine;
while ((line = sr.ReadLine()) != null)
{
//note: call your own replace function or use String.Replace here
newLine = Util.ReplaceDoubleBrackets(line);
sw.WriteLine(newLine);
}
}
}
public static string ReplaceDoubleBrackets(string str)
{
//note: this replaces the first occurrence of a word delimited by [[ ]]
//replace [[ with your own delimiter
if (str.IndexOf("[[") < 0)
return str;
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
//this part gets the string to replace, put this in a loop if more than one occurrence per line.
int posStart = str.IndexOf("[[");
int posEnd = str.IndexOf("]]");
int length = posEnd - posStart;
// ... code to replace with newstr
sb.Append(newstr);
return sb.ToString();
}