Question

What’s the most concise (but safe) way to remove a drive name, network path, etc. from an absolute path in C#?

For example, converting

\\networkmachine\foo\bar

or

C:\foo\bar

to \foo\bar.

There seem to be a good number of questions already answered with regards to path matters, but I couldn’t quite find what I was looking for. My own first thought that came to mind was to use Path.GetFullPath() to ensure I’m indeed working with an absolute path and then to just use a regular expression to find the first slash that isn’t next to another one. However, using a regular expression to do path manipulation seems slightly dangerous.

Would it perhaps be wiser to get the drive letter/target network machine/etc, convert the strings to Uri, and ask for the path relative to the drive/machine, and then convert back to strings? Or is there an even better approach?

Answer 1

use

string MyPath = @""; // \\networkmachine\foo\bar OR C:\foo\bar
string MyPathWithoutDriveOrNetworkShare = MyPath.Substring (Path.GetPathRoot(MyPath).Length);

Result for C:\foo\bar would be foo\bar and for \\networkmachine\foo\bar would be bar.

For MSDN reference see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.path.getpathroot.aspx

EDIT – as per comments:

With “string voodoo” (which is NOT concise IMHO and thus NOT recommended) you could do this:

if ( ( MyPath.IndexOf (":") == 1 ) || ( MyPath.IndexOf ( "\\\\" ) == 0 ) )
     { MyPathWithoutDriveOrNetworkShare = MyPath.Substring (2); }
if ( MyPathWithoutDriveOrNetworkShare.IndexOf ( "\\" ) > 0 )
     MyPathWithoutDriveOrNetworkShare = MyPathWithoutDriveOrNetworkShare.Substring ( MyPathWithoutDriveOrNetworkShare.IndexOf ( "\\" ) );