[Python-Dev] pathlib handling of trailing slash (Issue #21039) (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Fri Aug 8 14:27:28 CEST 2014

On 7 August 2014 02:55, Antoine Pitrou <antoine at python.org> wrote:

pathlib is generally concerned with filesystem operations written in Python, not arbitrary third-party tools. Also it is probably easy to append the trailing slash in your command-line invocation, if so desired.

I had a use case where I wanted to allow a config file to contain "path: foo" to create a file called foo, and "path: foo/" to create a directory. It was a shortcut for specifying an explicit "directory: true" parameter as well.

The fact that pathlib stripped the slash made coding this mildly tricky (especially as I wanted to cater for Windows users writing "foo\"...) It's not a showstopper, but I agree that semantically, being able to distinguish whether an input had a trailing slash is sometimes useful.

Paul

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