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I am in a refactoring stage for a project I am working on and would like to make some improvements to how I build and represent file system paths. What things should I take into consideration when representing relative paths in Java code to ensure compatibility on Ubuntu, OSX, and Windows 7.

Currently to get an instance of File referencing "MyProject/foo/bar.f" I would have code along the lines of:

File bar = new File(ProjectDirectory + "/" + FooResourceDirectory + "/" + barName);

This seems wrong for several reasons, what are some of the best practices?

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2 Answers 2

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Perhaps use the constructors provided to do this sort of thing:

new File(parent, child)

You have to "nest" them, but it's trivial to handle this (e.g. make a function to get a path built from something taking string....)

See the File constructors.

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File.pathSeparator is part what I was originally looking for, but I think I like the idea of using the built in constructors, and nesting/having a wrapper function more.
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First of all you should use File.separator File.pathSeparator instead of "/".

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Attention: File.pathSeparator != File.separator -- File.pathSeparator (for example "/")is the character to separate parts of one path, and File.separator (for example ";") is the character to separate different Paths
I prefer to use the correct constructor through: new File(parent, child)
@Ralph i think you mixed that up. ";" <-> "/"

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