Question

I have a complete file path and I want to get the file name.

I am using the following instruction:

String[] splittedFileName = fileName.split(System.getProperty("file.separator"));
String simpleFileName = splittedFileName[splittedFileName.length-1];

But on Windows it gives:

java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Unexpected internal error near index 1
\
 ^

Can I avoid this exception? Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

The problem is that \ has to be escaped in order to use it as backslash within a regular expression. You should either use a splitting API which doesn’t use regular expressions, or use Pattern.quote first:

// Alternative: use Pattern.quote(File.separator)
String pattern = Pattern.quote(System.getProperty("file.separator"));
String[] splittedFileName = fileName.split(pattern);

Or even better, use the File API for this:

File file = new File(fileName);
String simpleFileName = file.getName();