problem in file handling

[timmy]

in my program of file handling,i had stored different information of a student like name,marks,enrollment number,address etc in a text document...now if i want to read any one of it, that is, suppose if i want to read only the address of that particular student,how do i do it??i mean,how do i retrieve a particular information from a text document??

[hamsterman]

Just read it all. There is no other way unless you know exactly where in the file the thing you want to read is.

[timmy]

so what's the use of this file handling..i thought i would help me to retrieve data after running my program again..is there any other concept which can help me out with this

[hamsterman]

I'm not sure what you are talking about. If you run a program, enter some information, close the program and want to access that information again, file does help you to do that. If you just use a file as an alternative to array, don't. If you have a ludicrous amount of data to actually need this, you should probably use a database, I guess.. Though I'm sure you don't have that much.