Long file and path names

Question

I have a dialog window where users can choose a file, the name and path of which is then displayed. The field where this is displayed isn't big enough to hold the typical long path names found on for example Windows. I was wondering if there is a standardized way of shortening/abbreviating the full path name already written up somewhere? I want my program to be portable ... I looked at how MS Word does it on Windows, and I could write a specialized function to copy that, but then it wouldn't work on other systems that use different path conventions, and I would like to keep the generality if possible. On word they do something like this
C:/.../final directory/filename

Answer 1

Kramis wrote:
sure, that much I understand, but I wouldn't know how to create that sort of string from an arbitrary path name of unknown format. In Windows, for example, I could take the first three characters and then ..., but that might not work globally. The questions is about parsing and converting a path name from an arbitrary system.I'd just split the path into its 'final directory name' and 'file name' (with the universal Java path seperator of (/)), and stick '...' in front of it.
So any path such as C:/blah/blah/blah/endpath/filename or /unix/path/blah/blah/endpath/filename would become .../endpath/filename regardless of platform.