Jiro's pick this week is Short Path Name on Windows by Jerome Briot.

Thanks, Jerome! Your File Exchange entry helped me big time in my project. I was creating a program that managed a bunch of files, and some of the tasks required me to copy files from one network location to a new location. Sometimes, the new location would have a path name of 261 or more characters. In Windows API, 260 characters is the maximum number of characters allowed in a file path. I can overcome this issue if I map a drive to some path. For example,

\\networklocation\folder1\folder2\folder3\thisfile.txt
    -->
N:\folder3\thisfile.txt

However, I needed to make this a bit more portable so that my team members can use it on their machines. Then I remembered that back in the day, DOS used to abbreviate long path/file names (8.3 filename) to deal with its character limit. After Windows® 95, I've since slowly forgotten about the existence of 8.3 filename. But now, I have a real need for it.

I looked around the Web for the rules for converting a path name to a short path name. That's when I bumped into Jerome's entry. Rather than manually constructing the short file/path names, Jerome's functions uses Windows FileSystemObject (COM) to get the short names. This is obviously much more robust and the correct way.

thisFile = which(mfilename)
thisFile_short = fsoGetShortPath(thisFile)

thisFile =
C:\Users\jdoke\OneDrive for Business\MyStuff\Work\POTW\2015_06_26_ShortPathName\potw_shortname.m
thisFile_short =
C:\Users\jdoke\ONEDRI~1\MyStuff\Work\POTW\206E2D~1\POTW_S~1.M

Thanks again, Jerome. It worked perfectly!

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Published with MATLAB® R2015a

Published with MATLAB® R2015a