Won’t it be useful to always append trailing slashes to paths for all core path functions? We then would see at first glance if a path leads to a directory or a file. When you see for example ~/config, you can’t tell if this is a file or a directory – the implementation of this convention would clar…

[image] Tamas_Papp: I don’t know if this is true, but if anyone is handling paths like this, then they shouldn’t. Why not? Windows accepts forward slashes as path separators (except for command-line tools), even if backslashes are more idiomatic.

My specific point was this: if you use string concatenation instead of joinpath, it may work, but it can also miss some corner cases .

For what it’s worth, neither Python, Ruby nor bash append the trailing /. (Well, for bash it of course depends a bit on the context, but for example pwd doesn’t append.) If I had to take a guess I’d say it’s probably very standard not to append it. I’m not necessarily arguing Julia should follow …

[image] ExpandingMan: If I had to take a guess I’d say it’s probably very standard not to append it. For bash, it would definitely be very bad practice to append a / automatically, since many command line tools (eg cp and rsync) do something completely different depending on whether you appen…

I guess it might have been nice if dir/ were standard notation for a directory to denote that fact that it’s a directory. We’re 40 years too late on that decision though :laughing:

[image] Tamas_Papp: For bash , it would definitely be very bad practice to append a / automatically, since many command line tools (eg cp and rsync ) do something completely different depending on whether you append one. Wouldn’t mv <file> <dir> in a shell actually be better and safer when di…

[image] ExpandingMan: If anything, it might be worth investigating why normpath(dir,"..") appends trailing slash, as that would seem to be the non-standard thing here. Even weirder is that it only seems to do that when you use ".." . It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it’s always nice to have …

[image] fbruetting: a LOT of people (especially beginners) use … * "/" * … . Guilty as charged… Did not know I was doing this wrong and should have been using joinpath. You learn something new every day…

Does anybody think a Path or File or Dir type would be useful? I’ve had quite a few instances where I wanted methods in the line of: load_data(file_name::String) load_data(data::String) When dealing with these I had to come up with artificial solutions when what I really would’ve wanted was to d…

There is GitHub - rofinn/FilePaths.jl: A type based approach to working with filesystem paths in julia , and it also has been discussed on github to include this kinda thing in base (but I cannot find it).

Appending trailing slashes to paths

Internals & Design

StefanKarpinski October 8, 2018, 12:46am 20

Nope. Mostly looks like it requires a special path type, which we could still do.

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Appending trailing slashes to paths

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