Question

I am trying to extract the directory from a path that may or may not contain the file name. The problem is that when I am trying to get the directory name of a path that is already a directory, the Path.GetDirectoryName() returns the upper level of that dir. The path is loaded from the database so I cannot check the file attributes.

Ex.
Path.GetDirectoryName(“D:\Work\Project\Sources\trunk\Project2\bin\Debug”) returns “D:\Work\Project\Sources\trunk\Project2\bin\”

I was thinking of a simple algorithm, that checks if the path contains the “.” character; if yes, then we are dealing with a path that contains the file name. Unfortunately the directory names can also contain the “.” character.

I know that there is no perfect solution for this issue but what is the next best thing?

There is already a Stackoverflow question about the issue but it assumes that the file or directory already exists.

Answer 1

If your directory or file doesn’t exist, there is no way to know if it’s a file or a directory.

In your example D:\Work\Project\Sources\trunk\Project2\bin\Debug, there could be a file named Debug (without extension) in the bin directory.

Another example: D:\Work\Project\Sources\trunk\Project2\bin\Debug\file.exe, there could be a directory named file.exe which is a sub-dir of Debug…