Visual Basic 2008 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

5.13. Manipulate Strings Representing File Names

Problem

You want to retrieve a portion of a path or verify that a file path is in a normal (standardized) form.

Solution

Process the path using the System.IO.Path class. You can use Path.GetFileName to retrieve a file name from a path, Path.ChangeExtension to modify the extension portion of a path string, and Path.Combine to create a fully qualified path without worrying about whether your directory includes a trailing directory separation (\) character.

How It Works

File paths are often difficult to work with in code because of the many different ways to represent the same directory. For example, you might use an absolute path (C:\Temp), a UNC path (\\MyServer\\MyShare\temp), or one of many possible ...