.NET Console.WriteLine() Console.SetOut

Question

I have written a program to go through a fixed file and insert a | where needed, The program works fine and displays in the console correctly. The issue is I cannot get the line from the console to write to a line in the file. All attempts end up with an empty file or with each string of a line written as an individual line. The code below shows the one where it should write the output to a file but the file is blank.

Imports System.IO
Module Module1
    Sub Main()

        Dim stdFormat As Integer() = {3, 13, 11, 5, 2, 2, 13, 14, 30, 15, 76, 80, 95, 100, 50, 2, 10, 30}

        Using MyReader As New FileIO.TextFieldParser("SOURCE.txt")
            MyReader.TextFieldType = FileIO.FieldType.FixedWidth
            MyReader.FieldWidths = stdFormat

            Dim currentRow As String()
            While Not MyReader.EndOfData

                Try

                    Dim rowType = MyReader.PeekChars(3)

                    If String.Compare(rowType, "Err") = 0 Then


                    Else

                        MyReader.SetFieldWidths(stdFormat)

                    End If

                    currentRow = MyReader.ReadFields

                    For Each newString In currentRow


                        Console.Write(newString & "|")


                    Next


                    Dim file = New FileStream("test.txt", FileMode.Append)

                    Dim standardOutput = Console.Out

                    Using writer = New StreamWriter(file)

                        Console.SetOut(writer)

                        Console.WriteLine()

                        Console.SetOut(standardOutput)

                    End Using


                Catch ex As FileIO.MalformedLineException



                End Try

            End While


        End Using

        Console.ReadLine()


    End Sub

End Module

Answer 1

You are then setting the standard out stream to writer, writing a single newline to the standard out (redirected to writer), then resetting the standard out stream.

What you need to do is write to the file. Don't mess around with redirecting the streams. If we combine both the console and file writing, we can make this a bit cleaner.

Using writer = New StreamWriter(file)
    String newStr = ""
    For Each columnStr In currentRow
        newStr = columnStr & "|"
        writer.WriteLine(newStr)
        // If you don't want the console output, just remove the next line
        Console.WriteLine(newStr)
    Next
End Using