Expand environment variable for My Documents

Question

I know I can read environment variables like this:

Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments);

However, it would be r

Answer 1

Is there an environment variable that equals SpecialFolder.MyDocuments?

Short answer: No.

Long answer:
Still no. You can type "set" into a Command Prompt to see all you current environment variables. I couldn't find any for my documents folder on my profile (tried on WinXP and Win7).

Also, expanding "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents" would be incorrect since the user's documents folder could be anywhere else (e.g., on my home PC I always change mine to D:\Documents).

If you really need to use environment variables, one solution might be to set the variable yourself:

// this environment variable is created for the current process only
string documents = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments);
Environment.SetEnvironmentVariable("MYDOCUMENTS", documents);

Another solution might be to use a "fake" environment variable in the path and expand it yourself, something like:

string path = "%MYDOCUMENTS%\\Foo"; // read from config

// expand real env. vars
string expandedPath1 = Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables(path);

// expand our "fake" env. var
string documents = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments);
string expandedPath2 = path.Replace("%MYDOCUMENTS%", documents);