Often it’s useful for a C# program to combine relative paths. For example, when you build a program in Visual Studio, the executable program runs in the bin\Debug subdirectory below the source code directory. If you want to manipulate a file that is in the same directory as the project’s source code, you need to move two level up the directory tree from the executable program’s location.
The System.IO.Path class provides several static methods for manipulating file paths. The Combine method combines two paths.
Unfortunately that method simply concatenates the paths. For example, C:\Data\Test plus ..\data.txt gives C:\Data\Test\..\data.txt, which is probably not what you want. The .. part of the path moves to the parent directory, so what you probably want in this example is C:\Data\data.txt.
Fortunately the Path class’s GetFullPath method resolves a path that contains relative elements such as this one and returns an absolute path.
The following code shows how the program combines two paths that you enter.
txtResult.Text = Path.GetFullPath(
Path.Combine(txtPath1.Text, txtPath2.Text));
You can use a similar technique to combine paths in your programs. For example, a program running in Visual Studio can use the following code to find the path to its source code directory.
Console.WriteLine(Path.GetFullPath(
Path.Combine(Application.StartupPath, "..\\..")));
Note that the GetFullPath method uses both the \ and / characters as directory delimiters, so the following code also works.
Console.WriteLine(Path.GetFullPath(
Path.Combine(Application.StartupPath, "../..")));
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What if i have a folder structure /Data/TestData inside my project and I want to save a file here. I dont want to give the complete path. I want to find – “/Data/TestData” somewhere inside my project. i.e. my actual path is not –>Application.StartupPath+”/Data/TestData” .
instead this could be Application.StartupPath+”/FolderA/FolderB/Data/TestData” .
Is it possible to find the location just by specifying “Application.StartupPath” and “/Data/TestData”, without mentioning /FolderA/FolderB
Yes you can do that. You would need to recursively search the directory hierarchy. I think the Directory class’s Directories method will do that. See this Microsoft page.
Directory.GetDirectories Method
This explanation is more clear than the Microsoft .NET documentation is on this method.
But if Path.GetFullPath does what you described, then what are they talking about in the following link, which seems much more complicated that calling Path.GetFullPath?:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1399008/how-to-convert-a-relative-path-to-an-absolute-path-in-a-windows-application
I think the accepted solution on that post basically does the same thing as my example. I think the last two solutions are more complicated than they need to be. If you test this post’s example, I think it does what the others do such as handling different drive letters and relative paths.