Reading data from a text file

Text files are used to store and communicate data for many purposes. Unity makes it easy for you to read in the contents of a text file via the built-in TextAsset script class. In this recipe, you’ll add a UI Text item to a scene, and then write a script that at runtime will read the contents from the text file and display them to the player.

Figure 10.4: Showing the text file contents on screen at runtime

Getting ready

You can use any text file as the data for this recipe. We’ve provided a small text file containing a list of cities, in a cities.txt file in the 10_03 folder.

Figure 10.5: Contents of the text file cities.txt

How to do it...

To read data from a text file, perform the following steps:

1. Create a new Unity 2D project.
2. Import the provided cities.txt text file into the project (or use some other text file you have on your computer).
3. Load the TextMeshPro essentials resources...