Hello,

I want to use the Boost.Filesystem library in my Win32 application. I've stumbled upon a problem which may very well be my misunderstanding of how to use the library but reading the documentation doesn't clear up my confusion.

The user choses a path from a native UI and a bfs::path is constructed with the native name checker. This path needs to be persisted so I call the string() method which according to the documentation "Returns: The contents of m_name, formatted according to the rules of the generic path string grammar." I figured this string would be acceptable to the bfs::path constructor without specifying native because it's in the corrct grammar but I get an exception thrown. Here's a stripped down version of my code:

#include <iostream>
#include <iterator>
#include <boost/filesystem/operations.hpp>
namespace bfs = boost::filesystem;
int main()
{
try
{
// Path constructed from a native UI so constructed with native
bfs::path myPath("C:/autoexec.bat",bfs::native);
// Persist to grammar conformant string
std::string persisted = myPath.string();
// Recreate from persisted string - *THROWS EXCEPTION*
bfs::path otherPath(persisted);
}
catch(const std::exception& e)
{
std::cout << e.what() << std::endl;
}
return 0;
}

The exception string is "boost::filesystem::path: invalid name "C:" in path: "C:/autoexec.bat""

Can someone explain how I should be doing this please?

Thanks,

Pete