When should I use File separator and when File pathSeparator

Question

In the File class there are two strings  separator and pathSeparator  What s the difference  When should I use one over the other

User · Answer

You use separator when you are building a file path. So in unix the separator is /. So if you wanted to build the unix path /var/temp you would do it like this:

String path = File.separator + "var"+ File.separator + "temp"

You use the pathSeparator when you are dealing with a list of files like in a classpath. For example, if your app took a list of jars as argument the standard way to format that list on unix is: /path/to/jar1.jar:/path/to/jar2.jar:/path/to/jar3.jar

So given a list of files you would do something like this:

String listOfFiles = ...
String[] filePaths = listOfFiles.split(File.pathSeparator);

User · Answer

If you mean File separator and File pathSeparator then    File pathSeparator is used to separate individual file paths in a list of file paths  Consider on windows  the PATH environment variable  You use a   to separate the file paths so on Windows File pathSeparator would be     File separator is either   or   that is used to split up the path to a specific file  For example on Windows it is   or C  Documents Test

User · Answer

java io File class contains four static separator variables  For better understanding  Let s understand with the help of some code   separator  Platform dependent default name-separator character as String  For windows  it   s         and for unix it   s         separatorChar  Same as separator but it   s char pathSeparator  Platform dependent variable for path-separator  For example PATH or CLASSPATH variable list of paths separated by         in Unix systems and         in Windows system pathSeparatorChar  Same as pathSeparator but it   s char   Note that all of these are final variables and system dependent   Here is the java program to print these separator variables  FileSeparator java  import java io File   public class FileSeparator        public static void main String   args            System out println  File separator     File separator           System out println  File separatorChar     File separatorChar           System out println  File pathSeparator     File pathSeparator           System out println  File pathSeparatorChar     File pathSeparatorChar              Output of above program on Unix system   File separator     File separatorChar     File pathSeparator     File pathSeparatorChar       Output of the program on Windows system   File separator     File separatorChar     File pathSeparator     File pathSeparatorChar       To make our program platform independent  we should always use these separators to create file path or read any system variables like PATH  CLASSPATH   Here is the code snippet showing how to use separators correctly     no platform independence  good for Unix systems File fileUnsafe   new File  tmp abc txt      platform independent and safe to use across Unix and Windows File fileSafe   new File  tmp  File separator  abc txt

[java] When should I use File.separator and when File.pathSeparator?

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