How to: Open and Append to a Log File

03/30/2017
2 minutes to read
Contributors

StreamWriter and StreamReader write characters to and read characters from streams. The following code example opens the log.txt file for input, or creates the file if it does not already exist, and appends information to the end of the file. The contents of the file are then written to standard output for display. As an alternative to this example, the information could be stored as a single string or string array, and the WriteAllText or WriteAllLines method could be used to achieve the same functionality.

Note

Visual Basic users may choose to use the methods and properties provided by the Log class or FileSystem class for creating or writing to log files.

Example

using System;
using System.IO;

class DirAppend
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        using (StreamWriter w = File.AppendText("log.txt"))
        {
            Log("Test1", w);
            Log("Test2", w);
        }
        
        using (StreamReader r = File.OpenText("log.txt"))
        {
            DumpLog(r);
        }
    }

    public static void Log(string logMessage, TextWriter w)
    {
        w.Write("\r\nLog Entry : ");
        w.WriteLine("{0} {1}", DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString(),
            DateTime.Now.ToLongDateString());
        w.WriteLine("  :");
        w.WriteLine("  :{0}", logMessage);
        w.WriteLine ("-------------------------------");
    }

    public static void DumpLog(StreamReader r)
    {
        string line;
        while ((line = r.ReadLine()) != null)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(line);
        }
    }
}

Imports System
Imports System.IO

Class DirAppend
    Public Shared Sub Main()
        Using w As StreamWriter = File.AppendText("log.txt")
            Log("Test1", w)
            Log("Test2", w)
        End Using

        Using r As StreamReader = File.OpenText("log.txt")
            DumpLog(r)
        End Using
    End Sub

    Public Shared Sub Log(logMessage As String, w As TextWriter)
        w.Write(vbCrLf + "Log Entry : ")
        w.WriteLine("{0} {1}", DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString(), _
            DateTime.Now.ToLongDateString())
        w.WriteLine("  :")
        w.WriteLine("  :{0}", logMessage)
        w.WriteLine ("-------------------------------")
    End Sub

    Public Shared Sub DumpLog(r As StreamReader)
        Dim line As String
        line = r.ReadLine()
        While Not (line Is Nothing)
            Console.WriteLine(line)
            line = r.ReadLine()
        End While
    End Sub
End Class

How to: Open and Append to a Log File

Example

See Also