[Python-Dev] casefolding in pathlib (PEP 428) (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Fri Apr 12 12:06:30 CEST 2013

On 12 April 2013 09:39, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Ok, I've taken a look at the code. Right now lower() is used for two purposes:

1. comparisons (eq and ne) 2. globbing and matching While (1) could be dropped, for (2) I think we want glob("*.py") to find "SETUP.PY" under Windows. Anything else will probably be surprising to users of that platform.

If glob("*.py") failed to find SETUP.PY on Windows, that would be a usability disaster. Too many tools still exist that mangle filename case for anything else to be acceptable. For an easy example, the standard Windows ssh client, putty, is distributed as PUTTY.EXE. shutil.which('putty') needs to find that file if it's to be of any practical use.

For comparisons, I think naive Windows users would expect eq comparisons to work case insensitively, but Windows users with any level of understanding of cross-platform portability issues would be comfortable with the idea that this is risky. Having said that, currently there aren't any "pathname comparisons" as such, just string comparisons which "clearly" need application handling.

In all honesty, I don't think that equality comparison for path objects (as opposed to "pathnames" as strings) is necessarily even well defined. If someone has two path objects and tries to compare them for equality, my first question would be whether that's really what they want to do... (But case-sensitive comparison, with copious warnings, is probably a reasonable practical compromise).

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