c# - Read only first line from a text file

Question

so what I'm failing to do is, MyFile.txt has either "english", "french" or "german" in the first line and I want to get the language from the first line of the text file, then continue my code

String[] languages = new String[] { "english", "french", "german"};

foreach (String language in languages)
{
    string line1 = File.ReadLines("MyFile.txt").Skip(0).Take(1);
    line1 = language;
    continue;
}

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27345854/read-only-first-line-from-a-text-file

Answer 1

You can make use of File.ReadLines together with Enumerable.First. This gurantees you to only read the first line from the file.

using System.Linq; 

...

string line1 = File.ReadLines("MyFile.txt").First(); // gets the first line from file.

The difference to File.ReadAllLines is, that File.ReadLines makes use of lazy evaluation and doesnt read the wole file into an array of lines first.

Edit : Linq also makes sure of properly disposing the FileStream.