How do I get the file name of the file opened by JFilechooser?

Question

Currently I have

    final JFileChooser fc = new JFileChooser("src\\MovieBoxOffice\\MovieFiles");
        int returnVal = fc.showOpenDialog(openJButton);
        if(returnVal == JFileChooser.APPROVE_OPTION)
        {
        try
        {
             File selectedFile = fc.getSelectedFile();
             String filename = selectedFile.getAbsolutePath();
(....rest of code)

so filename is the FULL path. It looks something like

F:\Project3\src\MovieBoxOffice\MovieFiles\November2015.txt

I want it to end up getting just

November2015.txt

It'd be even better if it's just November2015

I can't seem to find a method that just straight up gets the file name.

I tried using the split method.

String[] str = filename.split("\\");

so I can get the last item of the array, which would be the file name. But that line of code is throwing exceptions:

Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Unexpected internal error near index 1

How can I get just the base filename?

Answer 1

selectedFile.getName() . Seriously, don't convert it to a String to begin with, File has to many nice methods, like selectedFile.getParentFile() will return you File reference to the path of the file!

For example...

File selectedFile = new File("F:\\Project3\\src\\MovieBoxOffice\\MovieFiles\\November2015.txt");
System.out.println(selectedFile.getName());
System.out.println(selectedFile.getParentFile());

Which outputs...

November2015.txt
F:\Project3\src\MovieBoxOffice\MovieFiles

So, the answer is, ditch filename , use selectedFile