The Java Tutorials have been written for JDK 8. Examples and practices described in this page don't take advantage of improvements introduced in later releases and might use technology no longer available.
See Java Language Changes for a summary of updated language features in Java SE 9 and subsequent releases.
See JDK Release Notes for information about new features, enhancements, and removed or deprecated options for all JDK releases.
The
Path
class includes various methods that can be used to obtain information about the path, access elements of the path, convert the path to other forms, or extract portions of a path. There are also methods for matching the path string and methods for removing redundancies in a path. This lesson addresses these Path
methods, sometimes called syntactic operations, because they operate on the path itself and don't access the file system.
This section covers the following:
A Path
instance contains the information used to specify the location of a file or directory. At the time it is defined, a Path
is provided with a series of one or more names. A root element or a file name might be included, but neither are required. A Path
might consist of just a single directory or file name.
You can easily create a Path
object by using one of the following get
methods from the
Paths
(note the plural) helper class:
Path p1 = Paths.get("/tmp/foo"); Path p2 = Paths.get(args[0]); Path p3 = Paths.get(URI.create("file:///Users/joe/FileTest.java"));
The Paths.get
method is shorthand for the following code:
Path p4 = FileSystems.getDefault().getPath("/users/sally");
The following example creates /u/joe/logs/foo.log
assuming your home directory is /u/joe
, or C:\joe\logs\foo.log
if you are on Windows.
Path p5 = Paths.get(System.getProperty("user.home"),"logs", "foo.log");
You can think of the Path
as storing these name elements as a sequence. The highest element in the directory structure would be located at index 0. The lowest element in the directory structure would be located at index [n-1]
, where n
is the number of name elements in the Path
. Methods are available for retrieving individual elements or a subsequence of the Path
using these indexes.
The examples in this lesson use the following directory structure.
The following code snippet defines a Path
instance and then invokes several methods to obtain information about the path:
// None of these methods requires that the file corresponding // to the Path exists. // Microsoft Windows syntax Path path = Paths.get("C:\\home\\joe\\foo"); // Solaris syntax Path path = Paths.get("/home/joe/foo"); System.out.format("toString: %s%n", path.toString()); System.out.format("getFileName: %s%n", path.getFileName()); System.out.format("getName(0): %s%n", path.getName(0)); System.out.format("getNameCount: %d%n", path.getNameCount()); System.out.format("subpath(0,2): %s%n", path.subpath(0,2)); System.out.format("getParent: %s%n", path.getParent()); System.out.format("getRoot: %s%n", path.getRoot());
Here is the output for both Windows and the Solaris OS:
Method Invoked | Returns in the Solaris OS | Returns in Microsoft Windows | Comment |
---|---|---|---|
toString |
/home/joe/foo |
C:\home\joe\foo |
Returns the string representation of the Path . If the path was created using Filesystems.getDefault().getPath(String) or Paths.get (the latter is a convenience method for getPath ), the method performs minor syntactic cleanup. For example, in a UNIX operating system, it will correct the input string //home/joe/foo to /home/joe/foo . |
getFileName |
foo |
foo |
Returns the file name or the last element of the sequence of name elements. |
getName(0) |
home |
home |
Returns the path element corresponding to the specified index. The 0th element is the path element closest to the root. |
getNameCount |
3 |
3 |
Returns the number of elements in the path. |
subpath(0,2) |
home/joe |
home\joe |
Returns the subsequence of the Path (not including a root element) as specified by the beginning and ending indexes. |
getParent |
/home/joe |
\home\joe |
Returns the path of the parent directory. |
getRoot |
/ |
C:\ |
Returns the root of the path. |
The previous example shows the output for an absolute path. In the following example, a relative path is specified:
// Solaris syntax Path path = Paths.get("sally/bar"); or // Microsoft Windows syntax Path path = Paths.get("sally\\bar");
Here is the output for Windows and the Solaris OS:
Method Invoked | Returns in the Solaris OS | Returns in Microsoft Windows |
---|---|---|
toString |
sally/bar |
sally\bar |
getFileName |
bar |
bar |
getName(0) |
sally |
sally |
getNameCount |
2 |
2 |
subpath(0,1) |
sally |
sally |
getParent |
sally |
sally |
getRoot |
null |
null |
Many file systems use "." notation to denote the current directory and ".." to denote the parent directory. You might have a situation where a Path
contains redundant directory information. Perhaps a server is configured to save its log files in the "/dir/logs/.
" directory, and you want to delete the trailing "/.
" notation from the path.
The following examples both include redundancies:
/home/./joe/foo /home/sally/../joe/foo
The normalize
method removes any redundant elements, which includes any ".
" or "directory/..
" occurrences. Both of the preceding examples normalize to /home/joe/foo
.
It is important to note that normalize
doesn't check at the file system when it cleans up a path. It is a purely syntactic operation. In the second example, if sally
were a symbolic link, removing sally/..
might result in a Path
that no longer locates the intended file.
To clean up a path while ensuring that the result locates the correct file, you can use the toRealPath
method. This method is described in the next section,
Converting a Path.
You can use three methods to convert the Path
. If you need to convert the path to a string that can be opened from a browser, you can use
toUri
. For example:
Path p1 = Paths.get("/home/logfile"); // Result is file:///home/logfile System.out.format("%s%n", p1.toUri());
The
toAbsolutePath
method converts a path to an absolute path. If the passed-in path is already absolute, it returns the same Path
object. The toAbsolutePath
method can be very helpful when processing user-entered file names. For example:
public class FileTest { public static void main(String[] args) { if (args.length < 1) { System.out.println("usage: FileTest file"); System.exit(-1); } // Converts the input string to a Path object. Path inputPath = Paths.get(args[0]); // Converts the input Path // to an absolute path. // Generally, this means prepending // the current working // directory. If this example // were called like this: // java FileTest foo // the getRoot and getParent methods // would return null // on the original "inputPath" // instance. Invoking getRoot and // getParent on the "fullPath" // instance returns expected values. Path fullPath = inputPath.toAbsolutePath(); } }
The toAbsolutePath
method converts the user input and returns a Path
that returns useful values when queried. The file does not need to exist for this method to work.
The
toRealPath
method returns the real path of an existing file. This method performs several operations in one:
true
is passed to this method and the file system supports symbolic links, this method resolves any symbolic links in the path.Path
is relative, it returns an absolute path.Path
contains any redundant elements, it returns a path with those elements removed.This method throws an exception if the file does not exist or cannot be accessed. You can catch the exception when you want to handle any of these cases. For example:
try { Path fp = path.toRealPath(); } catch (NoSuchFileException x) { System.err.format("%s: no such" + " file or directory%n", path); // Logic for case when file doesn't exist. } catch (IOException x) { System.err.format("%s%n", x); // Logic for other sort of file error. }
You can combine paths by using the resolve
method. You pass in a partial path , which is a path that does not include a root element, and that partial path is appended to the original path.
For example, consider the following code snippet:
// Solaris Path p1 = Paths.get("/home/joe/foo"); // Result is /home/joe/foo/bar System.out.format("%s%n", p1.resolve("bar")); or // Microsoft Windows Path p1 = Paths.get("C:\\home\\joe\\foo"); // Result is C:\home\joe\foo\bar System.out.format("%s%n", p1.resolve("bar"));
Passing an absolute path to the resolve
method returns the passed-in path:
// Result is /home/joe Paths.get("foo").resolve("/home/joe");
A common requirement when you are writing file I/O code is the capability to construct a path from one location in the file system to another location. You can meet this using the relativize
method. This method constructs a path originating from the original path and ending at the location specified by the passed-in path. The new path is relative to the original path.
For example, consider two relative paths defined as joe
and sally
:
Path p1 = Paths.get("joe"); Path p2 = Paths.get("sally");
In the absence of any other information, it is assumed that joe
and sally
are siblings, meaning nodes that reside at the same level in the tree structure. To navigate from joe
to sally
, you would expect to first navigate one level up to the parent node and then down to sally
:
// Result is ../sally Path p1_to_p2 = p1.relativize(p2); // Result is ../joe Path p2_to_p1 = p2.relativize(p1);
Consider a slightly more complicated example:
Path p1 = Paths.get("home"); Path p3 = Paths.get("home/sally/bar"); // Result is sally/bar Path p1_to_p3 = p1.relativize(p3); // Result is ../.. Path p3_to_p1 = p3.relativize(p1);
In this example, the two paths share the same node, home
. To navigate from home
to bar
, you first navigate one level down to sally
and then one more level down to bar
. Navigating from bar
to home
requires moving up two levels.
A relative path cannot be constructed if only one of the paths includes a root element. If both paths include a root element, the capability to construct a relative path is system dependent.
The recursive
example uses the Copy
relativize
and resolve
methods.
The Path
class supports
equals
, enabling you to test two paths for equality. The
startsWith
and
endsWith
methods enable you to test whether a path begins or ends with a particular string. These methods are easy to use. For example:
Path path = ...; Path otherPath = ...; Path beginning = Paths.get("/home"); Path ending = Paths.get("foo"); if (path.equals(otherPath)) { // equality logic here } else if (path.startsWith(beginning)) { // path begins with "/home" } else if (path.endsWith(ending)) { // path ends with "foo" }
The Path
class implements the
Iterable
interface. The
iterator
method returns an object that enables you to iterate over the name elements in the path. The first element returned is that closest to the root in the directory tree. The following code snippet iterates over a path, printing each name element:
Path path = ...; for (Path name: path) { System.out.println(name); }
The Path
class also implements the
Comparable
interface. You can compare Path
objects by using compareTo
which is useful for sorting.
You can also put Path
objects into a Collection
. See the
Collections trail for more information about this powerful feature.
When you want to verify that two Path
objects locate the same file, you can use the isSameFile
method, as described in
Checking Whether Two Paths Locate the Same File.