Move a folder to another in C#

Question

In C# I wrote a method to move a folder into another existing folder:

public void MoveFolder(string folderToMove, string destination)
{
 String destinationFolder = Path.Combine(
 destination, Path.GetFileName(folderToMove));
 Directory.Move(folderToMove, destinationFolder);
}

Usage:

MoveFolder(@"D:\myfolder\mysubfolder", @"C:\");

It works, but I am sure there is a more readable and shorter way to do that? In particular, I feel bad using GetFileName.

• No tricky things to worry about: The folders exist, and destination is not inside folderToMove nor the same.
• It must work on .NET 4.0 without additional libraries.

• Vojtěch Dohnal: See stackoverflow.com/a/13260186/2224701

Answer 1

This method is public but you don't do any validation about the passed in parameters which is a bad idea because your code is giving implementationdetails to a user of that method which he/she doesn't need to know. Assume folderToMove == null then PathCombine() will throw an ArgumentNullException which is the correct exception, but this is telling a user that you are using System.Path.Combine() which he/she doesn't need to know.

You should better do the validation yourself and throw the expected exception.

---

Instead of Path.GetFileName() you should use a DirectoryInfo object and read its Name property which you could extract to a separate method to construct the destination foldername like so

 public void MoveFolder(string folderToMove, string destination)
 {
 if (folderToMove == null)
 {
 throw new ArgumentNullException("folderToMove");
 }
 if (destination == null)
 {
 throw new ArgumentNullException("destination");
 }
 if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(folderToMove))
 {
 throw new ArgumentException("The parameter may not be empty", "folderToMove");
 }
 if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(destination))
 {
 throw new ArgumentException("The parameter may not be empty", "destination");
 }
 String destinationFolder = CreateDestinationFolderName(folderToMove, destination);
 Directory.Move(folderToMove, destinationFolder);
 }
 private string CreateDestinationFolderName(string folderToMove, string destination)
 {
 var directoryInfo = new DirectoryInfo(folderToMove);
 return Path.Combine(destination, directoryInfo.Name);
 }

• Abbas: Another reason to choose the DirectoryInfo class over the Path.GetFileName() method is that if the source path ends with a backslash (\ ), the result of the method will be empty whereas the Name property of the DirectoryInfo class will still give the correct name of the folder.
• t3chb0t: Do you really always check strings first for null and then for emptiness? Somehow strange ;-)
• Heslacher: @t3chb0t I do this just to throw different exceptions.