How do I get the file name from a String containing the Absolute file path?

Question

just use File.getName()

File f = new File("C:\\Hello\\AnotherFolder\\The File Name.PDF");
System.out.println(f.getName());

using String methods:

  File f = new File("C:\\Hello\\AnotherFolder\\The File Name.PDF");  
System.out.println(f.getAbsolutePath().substring(f.getAbsolutePath().lastIndexOf("\\")+1));

Alternative using Path (Java 7+):

Path p = Paths.get("C:\\Hello\\AnotherFolder\\The File Name.PDF");
String file = p.getFileName().toString();

Note that splitting the string on \\ is platform dependent as the file separator might vary. Path#getName takes care of that issue for you.

Using FilenameUtils in Apache Commons IO :

String name1 = FilenameUtils.getName("/ab/cd/xyz.txt");
String name2 = FilenameUtils.getName("c:\\ab\\cd\\xyz.txt");

Considering the String you're asking about is

C:\Hello\AnotherFolder\The File Name.PDF

we need to extract everything after the last separator, ie. \. That is what we are interested in.

You can do

String fullPath = "C:\\Hello\\AnotherFolder\\The File Name.PDF";
int index = fullPath.lastIndexOf("\\");
String fileName = fullPath.substring(index + 1);

This will retrieve the index of the last \ in your String and extract everything that comes after it into fileName.

If you have a String with a different separator, adjust the lastIndexOf to use that separator. (There's even an overload that accepts an entire String as a separator.)

I've omitted it in the example above, but if you're unsure where the String comes from or what it might contain, you'll want to validate that the lastIndexOf returns a non-negative value because the Javadoc states it'll return

-1 if there is no such occurrence