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The Answer to Every File Path Related Problem

If you do anything at all with file path, you need the Path class (in the System.IO namespace). The methods on the Path class that you're most likely to use include:

  • GetTempFileName: Doesn't just return a filename that's guaranteed to be unique -- it also creates the file in the TEMP folder so you can start writing to it
  • GetFileName: Returns the file name from a path (and returns null if the path is just the path to a folder without a file name)
  • GetDirectoryName: Passed a file path, pulls out the full path to the folder without the closing backslash. One warning: this method returns null if passed the root folder ("c:\")
  • Combine: Puts a set of strings together to create a valid file path. Combine will add or remove backslashes as necessary, so the method will do the right thing with the path return by GetDirectoryName

These are the answers; any more questions?

Posted by Peter Vogel on 08/24/2015


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