Question

I need to determine if a user-supplied string is a valid file path (i.e., if createNewFile() will succeed or throw an Exception) but I don’t want to bloat the file system with useless files, created just for validation purposes.

Is there a way to determine if the string I have is a valid file path without attempting to create the file?

I know the definition of ‘valid file path’ varies depending on the OS, but I was wondering if there was any quick way of accepting C:/foo or /foo and rejecting banana.

A possible approach may be attempting to create the file and eventually deleting it if the creation succeeded, but I hope there is a more elegant way of achieving the same result.

Answer 1

This would check for the existance of the directory as well.

File file = new File('c:\\cygwin\\cygwin.bat'); if (!file.isDirectory())    file = file.getParentFile(); if (file.exists()){     ... } 

It seems like file.canWrite() does not give you a clear indication if you have permissions to write to the directory.