[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >>> os.path.join("hello", "slash/world") > 'hello/slash/world' > >>> os.path.join("hello", "slash//world") > 'hello/slash//world' > Trying to formulate a general rule for what the arguments to > os.path.join are supposed to be is really hard.
If you're serious about writing platform-agnostic pathname code, you don't put slashes in the arguments at all. Instead you do os.path.join("hello", "slash", "world") Many of the other things you mention are also a result of not treating pathnames as properly opaque objects. If you're saying that the fact they're strings makes it easy to forget that you're supposed to be treating them opaquely, there may be merit in that view. It would be an argument for making path objects a truly opaque type instead of a subclass of string or tuple. > * although individual operations are atomic, shutil.copytree and > friends aren't. I've often seen python programs confused by > partially-copied trees of files. I can't see how this can be even remotely regarded as a pathname issue, or even a filesystem interface issue. It's no different to any other situation where a piece of code can fall over and leave a partial result behind. As always, the cure is defensive coding (clean up a partial result on error, or be prepared to tolerate the presence of a previous partial result when re-trying). It could be argued that shutil.copytree should clean up after itself if there is an error, but that might not be what you want -- e.g. you might want to find out how far it got, and maybe carry on from there next time. It's probably better to leave things like that to the caller. -- Greg _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com