Get a file name from a path

Question

What is the simplest way to get the file name that from a path?

string filename = \"C:\\\\MyDirectory\\\\MyFile.bat\"

In this example, I s

Answer 1

You can also use the shell Path APIs PathFindFileName, PathRemoveExtension. Probably worse than _splitpath for this particular problem, but those APIs are very useful for all kinds of path parsing jobs and they take UNC paths, forward slashes and other weird stuff into account.

wstring filename = L"C:\\MyDirectory\\MyFile.bat";
wchar_t* filepart = PathFindFileName(filename.c_str());
PathRemoveExtension(filepart); 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb773589(v=vs.85).aspx

The drawback is that you have to link to shlwapi.lib, but I'm not really sure why that's a drawback.

Answer 2

The Simplest way in C++17 is:

use the #include <filesystem> and filename() for filename with extension and stem() without extension.

    #include <iostream>
    #include <filesystem>
    namespace fs = std::filesystem;

    int main()
    {
        string filename = "C:\\MyDirectory\\MyFile.bat";

    std::cout << fs::path(filename).filename() << '\n'
        << fs::path(filename).stem() << '\n'
        << fs::path("/foo/bar.txt").filename() << '\n'
        << fs::path("/foo/bar.txt").stem() << '\n'
        << fs::path("/foo/.bar").filename() << '\n'
        << fs::path("/foo/bar/").filename() << '\n'
        << fs::path("/foo/.").filename() << '\n'
        << fs::path("/foo/..").filename() << '\n'
        << fs::path(".").filename() << '\n'
        << fs::path("..").filename() << '\n'
        << fs::path("/").filename() << '\n';
    }

output:

MyFile.bat
MyFile
"bar.txt"
".bar"
"."
"."
".."
"."
".."
"/"

Reference: cppreference

Answer 3

From C++ Docs - string::find_last_of

#include <iostream>       // std::cout
#include <string>         // std::string

void SplitFilename (const std::string& str) {
  std::cout << "Splitting: " << str << '\n';
  unsigned found = str.find_last_of("/\\");
  std::cout << " path: " << str.substr(0,found) << '\n';
  std::cout << " file: " << str.substr(found+1) << '\n';
}

int main () {
  std::string str1 ("/usr/bin/man");
  std::string str2 ("c:\\windows\\winhelp.exe");

  SplitFilename (str1);
  SplitFilename (str2);

  return 0;
}

Outputs:

Splitting: /usr/bin/man
 path: /usr/bin
 file: man
Splitting: c:\windows\winhelp.exe
 path: c:\windows
 file: winhelp.exe