Not commonprefix (was RE: [Python-Dev] commonprefix (original) (raw)

Not commonprefix (was RE: [Python-Dev] commonprefix - the beast just won't die...)

Tim Peters tim_one@email.msn.com
Tue, 22 Aug 2000 22:43:04 -0400

[Skip Montanaro]

I reverted the changes to {posix,nt,dos}path.commonprefix this morning, updated the tests (still to be checked in) and was starting to work on documentation changes, when I realized that something Guido said about using dirname to trim to the common directory prefix is probably not correct. Here's an example. The common prefix of ["/usr/local", "/usr/local/bin"] is "/usr/local" If you blindly apply dirname to that (which is what I think Guido suggested as the way to make commonprefix do what I wanted, you wind up with "/usr" which isn't going to be correct on most Unix flavors. Instead, you need to check that the prefix doesn't exist or isn't a directory before applying dirname.

[Thomas Wouters]

And even that won't work, in a case like this:

/home/swenson/ /home/swen/ (common prefix would be /home/swen, which is a directory)

Note that Guido's suggestion does work for that, though.

or cases like this:

/home/swenson/ /home/swenniker/ where another directory called /home/swen exists.

Ditto. This isn't coincidence: Guido's suggestion works as-is provided that each dirname in the original collection ends with a path separator. Change Skip's example to

["/usr/local/", "/usr/local/bin/"]
            ^ stuck in slashes ^

and Guido's suggestion works fine too. But these are purely string-crunching functions, and "/usr/local" screams "directory" to people thanks to its specific name. Let's make the test case absurdly "simple":

["/x/y", "/x/y"]

What's the "common (directory) prefix" here? Well, there's simply no way to know at this level. It's /x/y if y is a directory, or /x if y's just a regular file. Guido's suggestion returns /x in this case, or /x/y if you add trailing slashes to both. If you don't tell a string gimmick which inputs are and aren't directories, you can't expect it to guess.

I'll say again, if you want a new function, press for one! Just leave commonprefix alone.