[Python-Dev] Re: os.path.commonprefix breakage (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Thu, 17 Aug 2000 16:28:19 +1200 (NZST)

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Also, should the behavior be consistent across platforms or should it do what is correct for each platform on which it's implemented (dospath, ntpath, macpath)?

Obviously it should do what's correct for each platform, although more than one thing can be correct for a given platform -- e.g Unix doesn't care whether there's a trailing slash on a pathname.

In the Unix case it's probably less surprising if the trailing slash is removed, because it's redundant.

The "broken" code referred to in the original message highlights another problem, however: there is no platform-independent way provided to remove a prefix from a pathname, given the prefix as returned by one of the other platform-independent path munging functions.

So maybe there should be an os.path.removeprefix(prefix, path) function.

While we're on the subject, another thing that's missing is a platform-independent way of dealing with the notion of "up one directory".

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+