Golang OS Path Join

The filepath package in Go allows us to analyze and construct absolute file paths that can apply to multiple operating systems. For example, file paths in Linux use a forward slash as /dir/dir/dir/file while file-paths in Windows uses backward slashes as: C:\users

Username\dir\dir\file.

This article will learn how to construct file paths using the join() method from the path package.

Golang Filepath.Join()

The syntax for the function is as shown:

func Join(elem …string) string

The function takes any number of string arguments. It then takes each argument and creates a hierarchical path as a string.

Using the Join method is very efficient as it will depend on the operating system to determine the filepath format.

Suppose we have a file in dir1, dir2, dir3. To create a path to the file using the Join method, we can do:

package main
import (
"fmt"
"path/filepath"
)
func main() {
path := filepath.Join("dir1", "dir2", "dir3", "file.txt")
fmt.Println("Path => ", path)
}

If we execute the code above on a Windows machine, you get an output as:

Path => dir1\dir2\dir3\file.txt

On Linux, however, we can get an output as:

dir1/dir2/dir3/file.txt

As you can see, using the Join method provides a very dynamic and efficient method of creating filepaths instead of concatenating various elements.

Example 2

If you pass an empty string as the argument to the Join string, the function will ignore it as shown:

path := filepath.Join("")
fmt.Println("Path => ", path)

The above example should return an empty path as:

Path =>

Example 3

Consider the example shown below:

fmt.Println(filepath.Join("dir1//dir2//dir3", "file.txt"))

The code above should return the result as:

dir1\dir2\dir3\file.txt

Example 4

To get the file extension of a file in the provided path, you can use the Ext method. For example:

file := "info.config"
extension := filepath.Ext(file)
fmt.Println(extension)

The resulting output is as shown:

.config

Conclusion

This article covered how to create absolute paths using the Join method from the filepath package. This is a very useful package when you need to create paths that can be exported across multiple operating systems.

Goodbye, Fellow Gophers!!