Java – extract relative paths from absolute paths

This is a seemingly simple question, but I can't do it in a clean way I have a file path as follows:

/This / is / absolute / path / to / location / my / file

What I need is to extract / of / my / file from the path given above, because that is my relative path

I want to do this as follows:

String absolutePath = "/this/is/an/absolute/path/to/the/location/of/my/file";
String[] tokenizedPaths = absolutePath.split("/");
int strLength = tokenizedPaths.length;
String myRelativePathStructure = (new StringBuffer()).append(tokenizedPaths[strLength-3]).append("/").append(tokenizedPaths[strLength-2]).append("/").append(tokenizedPaths[strLength-1]).toString();

This may meet my immediate needs, but can anyone suggest a better way to extract sub paths from the paths provided in Java?

thank you

Solution

Use URI class:

URI base = URI.create("/this/is/an/absolute/path/to/the/location");
URI absolute =URI.create("/this/is/an/absolute/path/to/the/location/of/my/file");
URI relative = base.relativize(absolute);

This will result in / my / file