What is proper way to detect all available serial ports on Windows?

Question

There are several ways to list serial ports under Windows but I\'m not sure what is the proper way: the way that does detect all serial ports that are available.

One

Answer 1

This is a modernized version of @michael-jacob-mathew's answer:

#include 
#include 
#include 

bool SelectComPort() //added function to find the present serial 
{
    char lpTargetPath[5000]; // buffer to store the path of the COMPORTS
    bool gotPort = false; // in case the port is not found

    for (int i = 0; i < 255; i++) // checking ports from COM0 to COM255
    {
        std::string str = "COM" + std::to_string(i); // converting to COM0, COM1, COM2
        DWORD test = QueryDosDevice(str.c_str(), lpTargetPath, 5000);

        // Test the return value and error if any
        if (test != 0) //QueryDosDevice returns zero if it didn't find an object
        {
            std::cout << str << ": " << lpTargetPath << std::endl;
            gotPort = true;
        }

        if (::GetLastError() == ERROR_INSUFFICIENT_BUFFER)
        {
        }
    }

    return gotPort;
}

It produces the following output on my computer:

COM1: \Device\Serial0
COM3: \Device\VCP0