How to Generate a Relative Path from Two Absolute Paths in Java?

Creating Relative Paths from Two Absolute Paths

Given two absolute paths, such as:

/var/data/stuff/xyz.dat
/var/data

how can we generate a relative path that starts from the second path? For instance, the desired output for the paths above is:

./stuff/xyz.dat

Solution using URI

One approach leverages the URI class, which provides a relativize method to handle such conversions:

String path = "/var/data/stuff/xyz.dat";
String base = "/var/data";

// Convert the paths to URIs
URI pathURI = new File(path).toURI();
URI baseURI = new File(base).toURI();

// Obtain the relative URI
URI relativeURI = pathURI.relativize(baseURI);

// Extract the relative path
String relativePath = relativeURI.getPath();
// relativePath == "stuff/xyz.dat"

Note: For file paths specifically, Java 1.7 and later offers the relativize method on the java.nio.file.Path interface, as suggested by @Jirka Meluzin.

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