Question

Given I have two File objects I can think of the following implementation:

public File convertToRelative(File home, File file) {
    final String homePath = home.getAbsolutePath();
    final String filePath = file.getAbsolutePath();

    // Only interested in converting file path that is a 
    // direct descendants of home path
    if (!filePath.beginsWith(homePath)) {
        return file;
    }

    return new File(filePath.substring(homePath.length()+1));
}

Is there some smarter way of converting an absolute file path to a relative file path?

Possible Duplicate:

How to construct a relative path in java from two absolute paths or urls

Answer 1

This question was asked before here

Here is the answer just in case

String path = "/var/data/stuff/xyz.dat";
String base = "/var/data";
String relative = new File(base).toURI().relativize(new File(path).toURI()).getPath();
// relative == "stuff/xyz.dat"