A good file path builder library for C#?

Question

System.IO.Path in .NET is notoriously clumsy to work with. In my various projects I keep encountering the same usage scenarios which require repetitive, verbose and thus error-prone code snippets that use Path.Combine, Path.GetFileName, Path.GetDirectoryName, String.Format, etc. Scenarios like:

• changing the extension for a given file name
• changing the directory path for a given file name
• building a file path using string formatting (like "Package{0}.zip")
• building a path without resorting to using hard-coded directory delimiters like \ (since they don't work on Linux on Mono)
• etc etc

Before starting to write my own PathBuilder class or something similar: is there a good (and proven) open-source implementation of such a thing in C#?

UPDATE: OK, just an illustration of what I mean:

        string zipFileName = Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(directoryName) + ".zip";
        zipFileName = Path.Combine(
            Path.GetDirectoryName(directoryName), 
            zipFileName);

A nicer fluent API could look like this:

Path2 directoryName = "something";
Path2 zipFileName = directoryName.Extension("zip");

Or when building a path:

Path2 directoryName = "something";
Path2 directory2 = directoryName.Add("subdirectory")
    .Add("Temp").Add("myzip.zip");

instead of

string directory2 = Path.Combine(Path.Combine(Path.Combine(
     directoryName, "subdirectory"), "Temp"), "myzip.zip");

I actually did implement something like this in the past, but in a separate project. I've decided now to reuse it as a standalone C# class added "as link" in VisualStudio in my other projects. It's not a cleanest solution, but I guess it will do. If you're interested, you can see the code here.

Answer 1

You should take a look at the enhancements to Path in v4 of the framework first.

For example, Path.Combine will now accept multiple path fragments, rather than having to nest them.

Answer 2

System.IO.Path already covers the following from your list:

• changing the extension for a given file name
• changing the directory path for a given file name
• building a path without resorting to using hard-coded directory delimiters like \ (since they don't work on Linux on Mono)

And you can easily create a class or some extensions methods to do the remaining, based on the Path class.

Answer 3

FluentPath looks nice and neat.

Answer 4

You might also want to checkout the "NDepend.Helpers.FileDirectoryPath" library.