Retrieve the directory for a file in Visual Basic.net

If you need to know in which directory a particular file is, you can choose to do it easy or the hard way.

How to retrieve the full path for a file in Visual Basic - The Hard Way

To find the directory for a file in a do-it-yourself way, you could do the following:

1. Write a function to reverse a string
2. Feed this function with the full name of the file (path + filename)
3. Search for the first appearance of a backslash in the result of step 2. Call this position N.
4. Strip the first N characters from the result from step 2
5. Reverse the result of step 4. This is the full path.

or: Replace step 4 and 5 with: Strip the last N characters from the full name of the path.

As good developer I'm lazy if I can. So I only thought about how you could find the full path to a file in Visual Basic. I didn't write the code. It is better to do it the way Microsoft has designed Visual Basic.

Retrieving the directory from a file in Visual Basic - The smart way

Dim fil As String = "c:\test\dir1\example.txt"
Dim MyInfo As New FileInfo(fil)
MsgBox(MyInfo.DirectoryName)

This code shows "c:\test\dir1".

The FileInfo object can provide you with more information about a file, like size in bytes, dates of creation, last access and last modification.