How to Check If a Given String Is a Legal/Valid File Name Under Windows

How do I check if a given string is a legal/valid file name under Windows?

You can get a list of invalid characters from Path.GetInvalidPathChars and GetInvalidFileNameChars.

UPD: See Steve Cooper's suggestion on how to use these in a regular expression.

UPD2: Note that according to the Remarks section in MSDN "The array returned from this method is not guaranteed to contain the complete set of characters that are invalid in file and directory names." The answer provided by sixlettervaliables goes into more details.

Easiest way to check if an arbitrary String is a valid filename

Check whether filename.IndexOfAny(Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars()) < 0 and !File.Exists(Path.Combine(someFolder, filename))

How can I validate if a file is name valid in Windows?

The problem is not so simple, because it depends from what you consider a "valid file name".

The Windows APIs used with UNC paths will let you happily create a lot of names that are deemed invalid inside normal paths, since with the prefix \\?\ you are telling to the Windows APIs to just deliver the path to the filesystem driver, without performing any check; the filesystems themselves often do not really care about what it's used as a file name, once they know that some string is only the file name (i.e. the path/name split has already been done) they generally treat it just as an opaque sequence of characters.

On the other hand, if you want to play it safe, you should perform validation according to the rules specified by the MSDN document you already linked for Win32 names; I don't think that any file system is allowed to have more stringent rules than these on file naming. On the other hand, violating such requirements, although can be supported by the kernel itself, often give bad headaches to many "normal" applications that expect to deal with "traditional" Win32 paths.

But, in my opinion, if you have to create the file immediately, the best validation you can do is to try to actually create/open the file, letting the OS do such work for you, and be prepared to handle gracefully a failure (GetLastError should return ERROR_BAD_PATHNAME). This will check any other restriction you have on creating such file, e.g. that your application has the appropriate permissions, that the path is not on a readonly medium, ...

If, for some reason, this is not possible, you may like the shell function PathCleanupSpec: provided the requested file name and the directory in the file system where it has to be created, this function will remove all the invalid characters (I'm not sure about reserved DOS names, they are not listed in its documentation) making the path "probably valid" and notifying you if any modification was made (so you can use it also only for validation).

Notice that this function is marked as "modifiable or removable in any future Windows version", although Microsoft policy is generally that "anything that made it way to a public header will remain public forever".

Windows filename - How to check if filename would be valid?

Edit: the PathCleanupSpec function is now deprecated and no longer supported. Refer to the Requirements section at the end of the linked page for details.

Thanks Connor, for the function. For other readers, the function name is PathCleanupSpec. Using which I have implemented following:

bool IsLegalFileName(LPCWSTR filename)
{
    WCHAR valid_invalid[MAX_PATH];
    wcscpy_s(valid_invalid, filename);

    int result = PathCleanupSpec(nullptr, valid_invalid);

    // If return value is non-zero, or if 'valid_invalid' 
    // is modified, file-name is assumed invalid
    return result == 0 && wcsicmp(valid_invalid, filename)==0;
}

Validate a file name on Windows

Given the requirements specified in the previously cited MSDN documentation, the following regex should do a pretty good job:

public static boolean isValidName(String text)
{
    Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(
        "# Match a valid Windows filename (unspecified file system).          \n" +
        "^                                # Anchor to start of string.        \n" +
        "(?!                              # Assert filename is not: CON, PRN, \n" +
        "  (?:                            # AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, \n" +
        "    CON|PRN|AUX|NUL|             # COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9,     \n" +
        "    COM[1-9]|LPT[1-9]            # LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5,     \n" +
        "  )                              # LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9...     \n" +
        "  (?:\\.[^.]*)?                  # followed by optional extension    \n" +
        "  $                              # and end of string                 \n" +
        ")                                # End negative lookahead assertion. \n" +
        "[^<>:\"/\\\\|?*\\x00-\\x1F]*     # Zero or more valid filename chars.\n" +
        "[^<>:\"/\\\\|?*\\x00-\\x1F\\ .]  # Last char is not a space or dot.  \n" +
        "$                                # Anchor to end of string.            ", 
        Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE | Pattern.UNICODE_CASE | Pattern.COMMENTS);
    Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(text);
    boolean isMatch = matcher.matches();
    return isMatch;
}

Note that this regex does not impose any limit on the length of the filename, but a real filename may be limited to 260 or 32767 chars depending on the platform.

Check if a string is a valid Windows directory (folder) path

Call Path.GetFullPath; it will throw exceptions if the path is invalid.

To disallow relative paths (such as Word), call Path.IsPathRooted.

Determine via C# whether a string is a valid file path

A 100% accurate checking of a path's string format is quite difficult, since it will depend on the filesystem on which it is used (and network protocols if its not on the same computer).

Even within windows or even NTFS its not simple since it still depends on the API .NET is using in the background to communicate with the kernel.

And since most filesystems today support unicode, one might also need to check for all the rules for correcly encoded unicode, normalization, etc etc.

What I'd do is to make some basic checks only, and then handle exceptions properly once the path is used. For possible rules see:

Wikipedia - Filename for an overview of the rules used by different file systems
Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces for windows specific rules