Reading and Writing to a text file in Microsoft Visual Basic.NET

This code assumes that you have a string variable named FileName and a textbox named Textbox1. To see the text in the textbox, you should set the Multiline property to true and the scrollbars property to vertical on the textbox.

Reading a text file:

Dim FileName as string = "C:\MyFolder\MyFile.txt"

Dim FS As New IO.FileStream(FileName, IO.FileMode.Open)
Dim SR As New IO.StreamReader(FS)
TextBox1.Text = SR.ReadToEnd
FS.Close()

How does it work?

The System.IO namespace is full of classes to help you access file resources. Here we use a FileStream to attach to, and open a file. The FileStream provides access to the file, but you need a StreamReader to get the text from the file and place it in your textbox. The Stream reader's ReadToEnd method reads the entire contents of a file as a single string, placing it into TextBox1.

To write the file back, we use the same steps, only with a StreamWriter. Notice the the StreamWriter is flushed before the FileStream is closed. This ensures that the StreamWriter has a chance to finish writing before the connection to the file is closed.

Writing a text file:

Dim FS As New IO.FileStream(FileName, IO.FileMode.Create)
Dim SW As New IO.StreamWriter(FS)
SW.Write(TextBox1.Text)
SW.Flush()
FS.Close()

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