Resolving relative paths with wildcards in C#

Question

In C#, if I have a directory path and a relative file path with wildcard, e.g.

"c:\foo\bar" and "..\blah\*.cpp"

Is there a simple way to get the list of absolute file paths? e.g.

{ "c:\foo\blah\a.cpp", "c:\foo\blah\b.cpp" }

Background

There is a source code tree, where any directory can contain a build definition file. This file uses relative paths with wildcards to specify a list of source files. The task is to generate a list of absolute paths of all source files for each one of these build definition files.

System.IO.Directory.EnumerateFiles allows you to specify wildcards in the searchpattern param, see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd413233.aspx and will return absolute paths — Polity, Dec 15 '11 at 08:48
@Polity, System.ArgumentException: Search pattern cannot contain ".." to move up directories — NS.X., Dec 15 '11 at 19:29

Stephan Bauer · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-16T07:19:44.073

4

You can get the absolute path first and then enumerate the files inside the directory matching the wildcard:

// input
string rootDir = @"c:\foo\bar"; 
string originalPattern = @"..\blah\*.cpp";

// Get directory and file parts of complete relative pattern
string pattern = Path.GetFileName (originalPattern); 
string relDir = originalPattern.Substring ( 0, originalPattern.Length - pattern.Length );
// Get absolute path (root+relative)
string absPath = Path.GetFullPath ( Path.Combine ( rootDir ,relDir ) );

// Search files mathing the pattern
string[] files = Directory.GetFiles ( absPath, pattern, SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly );

edited Dec 16 '11 at 07:19

answered Dec 15 '11 at 09:12

Stephan Bauer

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Path.GetFullPath() throws ArgumentException: Illegal characters in path, if the path contains any wildcard. – NS.X. Dec 15 '11 at 19:22
You're right, I updated my code so that the relative search pattern is first divided into directory- and file-information and afterwards the absolute path is determined – Stephan Bauer Dec 16 '11 at 07:23
It works! Even better, rather than `string relDir = originalPattern.Substring ( 0, originalPattern.Length - pattern.Length );` We can use `string relDir = Path.GetDirectoryName(originalPattern);` – NS.X. Dec 17 '11 at 04:22
This works well, but only when no wildcards are used in the directory names of the relative path, like in the specific example provided by the question. – sɐunıɔןɐqɐp Feb 07 '19 at 07:41

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 07 '19 at 08:33

3

It's simple.

using System.IO;
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string[] files = Directory.GetFiles(@"c:\", "*.txt", SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly);

edited Feb 07 '19 at 08:33

Bernard Vander Beken

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answered Dec 15 '11 at 08:48

Greg Harris

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Resolving relative paths with wildcards in C#

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