Question

I’m surprised there’s not an overload that can take a string array. Anyway, what is the best way to avoid nesting calls to Path.Combine?

pathValue = Path.Combine(path1, Path.Combine(path2, Path.Combine(path3, path4)))

This seems inefficient since it results in four new strings being created just to get one.

Answer 1

The efficiency side of things isn’t the problem IMO – it’s the usability side of things. Personally I think there ought to be an overload of:

Combine(string first, string second, string third, params string[] others)

You need to have at least three to prevent it from clashing with the existing two-parameter version if you just write Path.Combine("foo", "bar") but it would certainly help to make code clearer. Why not open a feature request on Connect?

Of course, you can implement this yourself (and in another class the number of parameters doesn’t matter so much):

public static string CombinePaths(string first, params string[] others)
{
    // Put error checking in here :)
    string path = first;
    foreach (string section in others)
    {
        path = Path.Combine(path, section);
    }
    return path;
}