Java: Get URI from FilePath

Question

I've little knowledge of Java. I need to construct a string representation of an URI from FilePath(String) on windows. Sometimes the inputFilePath I get is: file:/C:/a.txt and sometimes it is: C:/a.txt. Right now, what I'm doing is:

new File(inputFilePath).toURI().toURL().toExternalForm()

The above works fine for paths, which are not prefixed with file:/, but for paths prefixed with file:/, the .toURI method is converting it to a invalid URI, by appending value of current dir, and hence the path becomes invalid.

Please help me out by suggesting a correct way to get the proper URI for both kind of paths.

Answer 1

These are the valid file uri:

file:/C:/a.txt            <- On Windows
file:///C:/a.txt          <- On Windows
file:///home/user/a.txt   <- On Linux

So you will need to remove file:/ or file:/// for Windows and file:// for Linux.

Answer 2

Just use Normalize();

Example:

path = Paths.get("/", input).normalize();

this one line will normalize all your paths.