Question

I would like to use the Directory.GetDirectories method to get all directories with some exclusions. In particular I need to exclude directories that have a hyphen in them. I already found out regular expressions to not work as search patterns. What search pattern would I use?

Answer 1

Maybe a linq query would be sufficient?

    //query notation
    var result = from d in Directory.GetDirectories(path) 
                 where !d.Contains("-")
                 select d;
    //'dot' notation
    var result2 = Directory.GetDirectories(path)
                  .Where(dir => !dir.Contains("-"));

EDIT(More explanation)

The solution above is called “LINQ to Objects”. It is a way of querying collections that implement IEnumerable or IEnumerable<T> interface. The GetDirectories method returns Array of string that is eligible to use Linq. There is a lot of stuff about Linq on the internet. To see te power of Linq flick through these examples on MSDN: 101 Linq Samples. BTW Linq is useful to retrieve data from various sources like XML, databases etx.