How to know position(linenumber) of a streamreader in a textfile?

I came across this post while looking for a solution to a similar problem where I needed to seek the StreamReader to particular lines. I ended up creating two extension methods to get and set the position on a StreamReader. It doesn't actually provide a line number count, but in practice, I just grab the position before each ReadLine() and if the line is of interest, then I keep the start position for setting later to get back to the line like so:

var index = streamReader.GetPosition();
var line1 = streamReader.ReadLine();

streamReader.SetPosition(index);
var line2 = streamReader.ReadLine();

Assert.AreEqual(line1, line2);

and the important part:

public static class StreamReaderExtensions
{
    readonly static FieldInfo charPosField = typeof(StreamReader).GetField("charPos", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly);
    readonly static FieldInfo byteLenField = typeof(StreamReader).GetField("byteLen", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly);
    readonly static FieldInfo charBufferField = typeof(StreamReader).GetField("charBuffer", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly);

    public static long GetPosition(this StreamReader reader)
    {
        // shift position back from BaseStream.Position by the number of bytes read
        // into internal buffer.
        int byteLen = (int)byteLenField.GetValue(reader);
        var position = reader.BaseStream.Position - byteLen;

        // if we have consumed chars from the buffer we need to calculate how many
        // bytes they represent in the current encoding and add that to the position.
        int charPos = (int)charPosField.GetValue(reader);
        if (charPos > 0)
        {
            var charBuffer = (char[])charBufferField.GetValue(reader);
            var encoding = reader.CurrentEncoding;
            var bytesConsumed = encoding.GetBytes(charBuffer, 0, charPos).Length;
            position += bytesConsumed;
        }

        return position;
    }

    public static void SetPosition(this StreamReader reader, long position)
    {
        reader.DiscardBufferedData();
        reader.BaseStream.Seek(position, SeekOrigin.Begin);
    }
}

This works quite well for me and depending on your tolerance for using reflection It thinks it is a fairly simple solution.

Caveats:

1. While I have done some simple testing using various Systems.Text.Encoding options, pretty much all of the data I consume with this are simple text files (ASCII).
2. I only ever use the StreamReader.ReadLine() method and while a brief review of the source for StreamReader seems to indicate this will still work when using the other read methods, I have not really tested that scenario.

No, not really possible. The concept of a "line number" is based upon the actual data that's already been read, not just the position. For instance, if you were to Seek() the reader to an arbitrary position, it's not actuall going to read that data, so it wouldn't be able to determine the line number.

The only way to do this is to keep track of it yourself.

It is extremely easy to provide a line-counting wrapper for any TextReader:

public class PositioningReader : TextReader {
    private TextReader _inner;
    public PositioningReader(TextReader inner) {
        _inner = inner;
    }
    public override void Close() {
        _inner.Close();
    }
    public override int Peek() {
        return _inner.Peek();
    }
    public override int Read() {
        var c = _inner.Read();
        if (c >= 0)
            AdvancePosition((Char)c);
        return c;
    }

    private int _linePos = 0;
    public int LinePos { get { return _linePos; } }

    private int _charPos = 0;
    public int CharPos { get { return _charPos; } }

    private int _matched = 0;
    private void AdvancePosition(Char c) {
        if (Environment.NewLine[_matched] == c) {
            _matched++;
            if (_matched == Environment.NewLine.Length) {
                _linePos++;
                _charPos = 0;
                _matched = 0;
            }
        }
        else {
            _matched = 0;
            _charPos++;
        }
    }
}

Drawbacks (for the sake of brevity):

1. Does not check constructor argument for null
2. Does not recognize alternate ways to terminate the lines. Will be inconsistent with ReadLine() behavior when reading files separated by raw \r or \n.
3. Does not override "block"-level methods like Read(char[], int, int), ReadBlock, ReadLine, ReadToEnd. TextReader implementation works correctly since it routes everything else to Read(); however, better performance could be achieved by
   • overriding those methods via routing calls to _inner. instead of base.
   • passing the characters read to the AdvancePosition. See the sample ReadBlock implementation:

---

public override int ReadBlock(char[] buffer, int index, int count) {
    var readCount = _inner.ReadBlock(buffer, index, count);    
    for (int i = 0; i < readCount; i++)
        AdvancePosition(buffer[index + i]);
    return readCount;
}