Why is Path.Combine better than “\\”?

Question

Over the years, and again recently, I have heard discussion that everyone should use Path.Combine instead of joining strings together with "\\\\", for example:

string myFilePath = Path.Combine("c:", "myDoc.txt");  
// vs.  
string myFilePath = "C:" + "\\myDoc.txt";

I'm failing to see the benefit that the former version provides over the latter and I was hoping someone could explain.

Answer 1

Building a path with Path.Combine is more readable and less error-prone. You don't need to think about directory separator chars( \\\\ or \\ or / on unix, ...) or if the first part of the path does or does not end in \\ and whether the second part of the path does or does not start with \\ .

You can concentrate on the important part, the directories and filenames. It's the same advantage that String.Format has over string concatenation.

Answer 2

When you don't know the first directory (eg it comes from user input), you may have C:\\Directory or C:\\Directory\\ and Path.Combine will solve the trailing slash problem for you. It does have quirks with leading slashes for the next arguments though.

Second, while usually not a problem for most applications, with Path.Combine you aren't hard-coding the platform directory separator. For an application that can be deployed to other operating systems than windows this is convenient.

Answer 3

其他平台可以使用不同的Separator，例如/而不是\\所以不使用\\\\的原因是SO独立

Answer 4

In this case, it does not really matter, but why don't you just write:

string myFilePath = "C:\\myDoc.txt";

The Path.Combine() method is useful if you are working with path variables and you don't want to check for backslashes (or whatever slashing required, depending on the platform):

string myFilePath = Path.Combine(path, filename);