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

Modified @Dženan answer to use wide characters and returning list of ints

#include 
#include 

list RS232_Port::getAvailablePorts()
{
    wchar_t lpTargetPath[5000]; // buffer to store the path of the COMPORTS
    list portList;

    for (int i = 0; i < 255; i++) // checking ports from COM0 to COM255
    {
        wstring str = L"COM" + to_wstring(i); // converting to COM0, COM1, COM2
        DWORD res = QueryDosDevice(str.c_str(), lpTargetPath, 5000);

        // Test the return value and error if any
        if (res != 0) //QueryDosDevice returns zero if it didn't find an object
        {
            portList.push_back(i);
            //std::cout << str << ": " << lpTargetPath << std::endl;
        }
        if (::GetLastError() == ERROR_INSUFFICIENT_BUFFER)
        {
        }
    }
    return portList;
}