Reading Subdirectories with win32 - c++

Question

I'm trying to read some sub-directories with win32 functions and it looks like this. Most everything works fine. I haven't got to run the function completely because I'm still debugging it. My problem: I have 5 actual files and two sub-directories. When I try to grab the file names of each subdirectory and file in the directory I get this: ".", "..", "Subdirectory1", "Subdirectory", "rest of the files"... Why did I get a period, two periods, and then the actual files in the folder?
static std::vector<std::string> ReadAllFilesIntoArray(std::string contentDirPath, std::string fileType)
{
std::vector<std::string> filePaths;
std::wstring strTemp;
strTemp.assign(contentDirPath.begin(), contentDirPath.end());
HANDLE hFile = INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE;
WIN32_FIND_DATA FindFileData;
hFile = FindFirstFile(strTemp.c_str(), &FindFileData);
if (INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE != hFile)
{
int i = 0;
do{
// If it's a directory
if (FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY & FindFileData.dwFileAttributes)
{
// Convert wchar[260] -> std::string
char ch[260];
char DefChar = ' ';
WideCharToMultiByte(CP_ACP, 0, FindFileData.cFileName, -1, ch, 260, &DefChar, NULL);
std::string ss(ch);
std::vector<std::string> localFilePaths = ReadAllFilesIntoArray(contentDirPath.assign(contentDirPath.begin(), contentDirPath.end() - 5) + ss + "//*", fileType);
// Append the file paths found in the subdirectory to the ones found in the current directory
filePaths.insert(filePaths.begin(), localFilePaths.begin(), localFilePaths.end());
}
// Convert wchar[260] -> std::string
char ch[260];
char DefChar = ' ';
WideCharToMultiByte(CP_ACP, 0, FindFileData.cFileName, -1, ch, 260, &DefChar, NULL);
std::string tempString(ch);
// Then add to list if it's equal to the file type we are checking for
if (tempString.substr(tempString.size() - 3, tempString.size()) == fileType)
{
filePaths.resize(i + 1);
filePaths[i] = ch;
i++;
}
} while (FindNextFile(hFile, &FindFileData));
FindClose(hFile);
}
return filePaths;
}

Answer 1

They are special names that represent the current directory (.) and the parent directory (..). Enumeration code is typically written with special case checks to ignore these two special values.