In Visual Basic .NET you read a text file by first opening a StreamReader on it, and then iterating over all its lines until its Peek method returns -1:

Dim sr As New StreamReader("c:autoexec.bat")' Display all the text lines in the file.Do Until sr.Peek = -1    ' The ReadLine methods reads whole lines.    Console.WriteLine(fs.ReadLine)Loop' Always close a StreamReader when you've done with it.sr.Close()

You can also read one character at a time withusing the Read method, or you can read all the remaining characters withusing the ReadToEnd method. For example, this routine returns the entire contents of any text file in one operation:

Function ReadTextFile(ByVal filename As String) As String    Dim sr As New StreamReader(filename)    ReadTextFile = sr.ReadToEnd()    sr.Close()End Function