Seed.IO

Helper Library that contains an array of useful classes and helpers for working with IO in C#.

Seed.IO
File Paths

File Paths

Strings are used as the go to type when working with file paths in code however they have a bunch of issues.

Which direction to the braces go?
Does this path end with a slash or not?
Is this argument support a relative path or does it requires absolute?
How do I get the parent directory.

AbsolutePath and RelativePath try to fix this issues for you. Below is some of the things they can do to help you make less mistakes when it comes to IO.

Concatenation

Combining paths is one of the best features, you can never get the slash direction working

AbsolutePath images = new AbsolutePath("C:\\");
images \= "Images";
images \= "Cats" \ "On Holidays";
WriteLine(images);

// output: C:\\Images\Cats\On Holidays

Both the path objects have overload the division operator to make concatenation brain dead simple. You can get the brace is the wrong direction if you never type them out.

Path Comparison

All paths are normalized behind the scenes making comparison consistent. Below we have two paths with diffent casing and different seperators.

AbsolutePath leftString = new AbsolutePath("C:\\data");
AbsolutePath rightString = new AbsolutePath("c://DATA");

WriteLine($"The two paths are equal {leftString == rightString}");

// output: true

Paths are also resolved so any '..' are removed.

AbsolutePath leftString = new AbsolutePath("C:\\data");
AbsolutePath rightString = new AbsolutePath("C:\\data\\images\\...");

WriteLine($"The two paths are equal {leftString == rightString}");

// output: true

Multi Platform

The direction of the seperators changes depending on your current platform

// Enter a relative path with mixed separators
RelativePath path = new RelativePath("./docs\dogs");
// On Windows
path.ToString(); // .\docs\dogs
// Unix
path.ToString(); // ./docs/dogs 

// Note: AbsolutePaths are based off their root.

On Windows all paths are case insensitive but on linux systems they are case sensitive.

Getting Relative Paths

You can get relatives path simply with one function call.

AbsolutePath left = "C:\\data\\graphs\\graph.png";
AbsolutePath right = "C:\\data\\images\\";
RelativePath relative = left.GetRelative(right);
WriteLine(relative);

// output: ".\..\images"