Visual Studio C# Selenium: cannot find Driver

Question

I run this code and continually snag on the line: "IWebDriver Driver = new OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome.ChromeDriver();" When i run it this way, not directing to the ChromeWebDriver, I get: "the chromedriver.exe file does not exist in the current directory or in a directory on the PATH environment variable."

When I give the path to the ChromeWebDriver I get this: "error CS1009: Unrecognized escape sequence"

using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
  using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Windows.Forms;


namespace WindowsFormsApplication2
{
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
    public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
    }

    private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
 IWebDriver Driver = new OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome.ChromeDriver
 ("C:\Users\stand\Documents\
 Visual Studio 2015\Projects\WindowsFormsApplication2\ChromeWebDriver.exe");
             Driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://dallas.craigslist.org/");
        IWebElement Element = Driver.FindElement(By.Name("query"));
        Element.SendKeys("cx-5");

       }
   }
}

Answer 1

Use

IWebDriver Driver = new OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome.ChromeDriver (@"C:\Users\stand\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\WindowsFormsApplication2\ChromeWebDriver.exe");

The Backslash has a special meaning in string literals. You could duplicate all backslashes or as in this example make the string literal to a "verbatim string literal" by adding the @ sign at the beginning. In verbatim string literals, the backslash has no special meaning

---

Another solution which means you don't have to manually specify the full path of the exe file can be found in this answer: Add the ChromeWebDriver.exe file to the project and choose to have it copied automatically to the same folder as your own application.exe.

Answer 2

You need to either escape the backslashes in the path or use string literals.

IWebDriver Driver = new ChromeDriver (@"C:\Users\stand\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\WindowsFormsApplication2\ChromeWebDriver.exe");