C# enumerating files in a folder

Learn more. Get list of files in directory with exclude option Ask Question. Asked 6 years, 8 months ago. Active 6 years, 8 months ago. Viewed 44k times. The method receives the following parameters: string path : folder path to scan for files. SearchOption searchOption : TopDirectoryOnly to scan only the specified folder or AllDirectories to scan tree folder under the specified path. GetExtension filename ; if Array. IndexOf exclude, Path. IsNullOrEmpty extension Array.

Improve this question. There's no reason to fetch file names otherwise. Also your check could be exclude! I'll add the check against null. That's a bug. Add a comment.

Active Oldest Votes. MSDN on yield I don't like that both filenames and extensions are in the same array. Contains Path. An enumerable collection of the full names including paths for the files in the directory specified by path and that match the specified search pattern and search option. NET Framework and.

NET Core versions older than 2. You can query for invalid characters by using the GetInvalidPathChars method. The following example shows how to retrieve all the text files in a directory and its subdirectories, and move them to a new directory.

After the files are moved, they no longer exist in the original directories. The following example recursively enumerates all files that have a.

The following wildcard specifiers are permitted in searchPattern. Characters other than the wildcard are literal characters. This behavior only occurs if an asterisk is used in the search pattern and the file extension provided is exactly three characters. If you use the question mark wildcard character instead of the asterisk, this method returns only files that match the specified file extension exactly. The following table depicts this anomaly in. NET Framework. You can specify relative path information with the path parameter.

GetFiles , see here: stackoverflow. Show 3 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Chris Sinclair Chris Sinclair 22k 3 3 gold badges 49 49 silver badges 89 89 bronze badges. Wouldn't Directory. Encoding with the pinnacle of technology. In some respects, writing your own version of this is handy even on. Net 4 or later - because the. Net 4 version doesn't have any easy way of handling exceptions due to inaccessible system folders. At least if you roll-your-own, you can add proper handling.

But I like this better. JohnH Probably, falls under the "don't reinvent the wheel" comment. I was answering Mike's question specifically about why his implementation was not working. Also note that Directory.

GetFiles is evaluated eagerly which could take a long time or a lot of memory depending on its usage whereas this implementation is deferred. Fair enough. C program that uses Directory. Recursive example. Often we need to get the list of files in a certain directory, and then scan all subdirectories in the folder.

The SearchOption. AllDirectories enum is the best solution. Recursive File List. Note EnumerateFiles is helpful on a recursive directory scan, as the result count might be large.

Here We call EnumerateFiles to get all the deeply-nested files in directories. Notice the result files have different directories. C program that uses SearchOption.