Sorting files according to creation time and storing in string array is possible?-CodePudding

I am trying to sort files according to their creation time from a specific directory and store them in a string array. But I am getting the error "Cannot implicitly convert type 'System.IO.FileInfo[]' to 'string[]'. Is it not possible the store the data in string array?

Here is my code:

string[] getFiles(string path, string text, string fileExtension)
        {
            try
            {
                string searchingText = text;
                searchingText = "*"   text   "*";
                string[] filesArray = Directory.GetFiles(path, searchingText, SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly).Select(f => new FileInfo(f)).OrderBy(f => f.CreationTime).ToArray();
                //filesArray = filesArray.OrderBy(s => s.).ToArray();
                //string[] filesArray2 = Array.Sort(filesArray);
                List<string> filesList = new List<string>(filesArray);
                List<string> newFilesList = new List<string>();
                foreach(string file in filesList)
                {
                    if ( file.Contains(fileExtension) == true)
                    {
                        newFilesList.Add(file);
                    }
                }
                string[] files = newFilesList.ToArray();
                return files;
            }
            catch
            {
                string[] files = new string[0];
                return files;
            }

        }

CodePudding user response：

Where are you getting that error? The error is pretty self-explanotory: your function returns an array of strings, and you cannot simply cast a string to a FileInfo object. In order to get a FileInfo object, use:

var fi = new FileInfo(fileName);

However, if all you want is to get a sorted list, I'd go about this differently, for example:

var folder = @"C:\temp";
var files = Directory
    .EnumerateFiles(folder)
    .OrderBy(x => File.GetCreationTime(x))
    .ToArray();

This will give you a list of strings holding file names, sorted by their creation date.

Edit:

If you'd only want files with a given extension, you could expand the LINQ query:

var files = Directory
    .EnumerateFiles(folder)
    .Where(x => x.EndsWith(".ext"))
    .OrderBy(x => File.GetCreationTime(x))
    .ToArray();