[Python-Dev] Pathlib enhancments - method name only (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sun Apr 10 02:38:35 EDT 2016

Eric Snow wrote:

All this matters because it impacts the value returned from ospath(). Should it return the string representation of the path for the current OS or some standardized representation?

What standardized representation? I'm not aware of such a thing.

I'd expect the former. However, if that is the expectation then something like pathlib.PureWindowsPath will give you the wrong thing if your current OS is linux.

No, you should get the representation corresponding to the kind of path object you started with. If you're working with Windows path objects on a Unix system, they must be representing something on some Windows system somewhere, not the one you're running the code on. The only reason to ask for a string representation of such a path is for use by that other system.

I don't think it even makes sense to ask for a Unix representation of a Windows path or vice versa, because the semantics are different. How do you translate a Windows drive letter into Unix? What drive letter do you use for an absolute Unix path?

-- Greg

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