On 2013-06-06 17:27:28 +0000, Walter Bright <[email protected]> said:
That doesn't work for case sensitivity/insensitivity differences nor
does it work for drive letters like "C:" (which don't exist on Apple
systems, hence they can afford to dismiss them).
Have you never opened a local file in a windows web browser and took a
look at the URL? The drive letter is there.
file:///c:/path/to/the%20file.txt
The drive letter is simply the first part of the path on Windows.
But there's no getting around the fact that "File" and "file" are
different paths under Windows, and are the same under Linux.
Actually, it doesn't depend on Linux or Windows or OS X. It depends on
the filesystem used, be it FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, ext{1,2,3}, HFS+,
Case-sensitive HFS+, etc. If you assume a specific case sensitivity
setting by looking at the OS, that's a bug. You can mount NTFS and FAT
on Linux or OS X, and Apple has Case-sensitive HFS+ for OS X and its
the default on iOS. Then there's the whole issue about which locale to
use for Unicode case-insensitive comparisons. I'd bet that different
filesystems choose different approaches to this tricky problem.
So there's no way to normalize for case-sensitivity just by looking at
a path or a URL, even if you know on which OS you're on. If you want to
know for sure whether two paths are the same, or what is the normalized
path, you need to ask the filesystem at some point. Anything else is
based on fragile assumptions.
--
Michel Fortin
[email protected]
http://michelf.ca/
