VB.Net - FileInfo.FullName - Am I missing something?

Question

I have some some code which was written before I started here (sounds like a submission for The Daily WTF!) which loads an xml file for processing (the Throw line has been simplified to hide the identity of the culprit, otherwise its verbatim).

Try
    docData.Load(strPath)
Catch oError As Exception
    Throw New Exception("There is a load or parse error in the xml")
End Try

oFileInfo = New FileInfo(strPath)
strFileName = oFileInfo.FullName
oFileInfo = Nothing

strFileName is used once more in the method, passed to another method

strPath is used once more in the method, when deleting the file

From MSDN:

FullName: Gets the full path of the directory or file. (Inherited from FileSystemInfo.)

Surely then, that is simply returning what is already in strPath and can be replaced with a simple

strFileName = strPath

Or even do away with strFileName altogether and use strPath throughout.

Or am I missing something? Does FileInfo.FullName do anything else?

I did think it was a file exists check, but that has already been taken care of by the Try...Catch around the XmlDocument.Load and besides, File.Exists(strPath) would be much simpler.

Answer 1

FileInfo.FullName will return the full path even if the input strPath is a relative path.

Answer 2

What @Joe is saying is that technically strPath could be a relative path. When you pass that into FileInfo and retrieve the FullName property it gets converted into an absolute path. Although you says that everything is UNC (and by that I'm assuming you also mean absolute paths) its possible that at one point this was called with relative paths. For instance this code will output c:\Users\...\bin\somefile.bin

    Dim F As New System.IO.FileInfo("..\somefile.bin")
    Trace.WriteLine(F.FullName)
    Me.Close()

If you know that you'll always be dealing with absolute paths you can probably get rid of that code now.