Handy Web Path Concatenation Code - More Muc Than You Can Handle

Lot of web developement code is spent concatenating path snippets and I always hated having to deal with slashes. I wanted a function that was consistent with its return type, and very loose in its parameter requirements. I ended up with the following:

Test First:

using bddunit.core; using CBC.Radio3.Commons.Specs; using Observation = MbUnit.Framework.TestAttribute; using SUT = CBC.Radio3.Commons.Web.WebPath; namespace CBC.Radio3.Commons.Web { [Concern(typeof (WebPath))] public class when_WebPath_Combines_a_bunch_of_strings : ContextSpecification { private string result; protected override void establish_context() { } protected override void because() { result = SUT.Combine("/slashesonbothsides/", "//doubleslash//", "rightslash/", "/leftslash", "file.jpg"); } [Observation] public void should_return_an_absolute_web_path() { result.should_be_equal_to("/slashesonbothsides/doubleslash/rightslash/leftslash/file.jpg"); } } }

The BDD style of testing is inspired (and pretty much copied) from JP Boodhoo’s Nothing but .Net class.

Here’s the code:

using System.Text; namespace CBC.Radio3.Commons.Web { public class WebPath { /// <summary> /// Takes a parameter list of strings and returns the strings concatenated with a /// preceding '/' character. If the string has a trailing/preceding slash it will /// be removed. Any slashes in the middle of the string will remain. /// </summary> /// <param name="paths"></param> /// <returns>Contatenation of paths seperated by directory seperator</returns> public static string Combine(params string[] paths) { var sb = new StringBuilder(); foreach (var path in paths) sb.AppendFormat("/{0}", path.TrimEnd('/').TrimStart('/')); return sb.ToString(); } } }

That was my first go at it. I have a feeling I might generalize the class to be a delimited string builder. Which would be nice because then the method won’t be static. Anyways, just thought I would share something that I think is concise but will be used a lot.

Comments