Why does .NET add an additional slash to the already existent slashes in a path?

The \\ is used because the \ is an escape character and is need to represent the a single \.

So it is saying treat the first \ as an escape character and then the second \ is taken as the actual value. If not the next character after the first \ would be parsed as an escaped character.

Here is a list of available escape characters:

\' - single quote, needed for character literals
\" - double quote, needed for string literals
\\ - backslash
\0 – Null 
\a - Alert 
\b - Backspace 
\f - Form feed 
\n - New line 
\r - Carriage return 
\t - Horizontal tab 
\v - Vertical quote 
\u - Unicode escape sequence for character 
\U - Unicode escape sequence for surrogate pairs. 
\x - Unicode escape sequence similar to "\u" except with variable length.

EDIT: To answer your question regarding Split, it should be no issue. Use Split as you would normally. The \\ will be treated as only the one character of \.

Debugger visualizers display strings in the form in which they would appear in C# code. Since \ is used to escape characters in non-verbatum C# strings, \\ is the correct escaped form.

.Net is not adding anything to your string here. What your seeing is an effect of how the debugger chooses to display strings. C# strings can be represented in 2 forms

• Verbatim Strings: Prefixed with an @ sign and removes the need o escape \\ characters
• Normal Strings: Standard C style strings where \\ characters need to escape themselves

The debugger will display a string literal as a normal string vs. a verbatim string. It's just an issue of display though, it doesn't affect it's underlying value.