Why are we getting “The path is not of a legal form” for a FileInfo constructor?

Colin Desmond picture Colin Desmond · Jul 21, 2009 · Viewed 33.8k times · Source

We're creating a FileInfo object in C# using the following code:

if (planConfig->OrganisationsFilePath != nullptr)
{
   FileInfo^ file = gcnew FileInfo(planConfig->OrganisationsFilePath);
   //Do some stuff here
}

and our customers are reporting that they see an ArgumentException with “The path is not of a legal form” as the message being thrown. We cannot reproduce this and we're wondering what string you'd need to pass to the FileInfo constructor to see this error?

Answer

galaktor picture galaktor · Jul 21, 2009

The path probably contains invalid characters. See the MSDN documentation on FileInfo constructor.

ArgumentException:The file name is empty, contains only white spaces, or contains invalid characters.