On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 at 12:06, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 6:39 PM Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:

There are *many* valid ways to write Windows pathnames in your code:

1. Raw strings
2. Doubling the backslashes
3. Using pathlib (possibly with slash as a directory separator, where
it's explicitly noted as a portable option)
4. Using slashes

IMO, using slashes is the *worst* of these. But this latter is a
matter of opinion - I've no objection to others believing differently,
but I *do* object to slashes being presented as the only option, or
the recommended option without qualification.

Please expand on why this is the worst?

I did say it was a matter of opinion, so I'm not going to respond if
people say that any of the following is "wrong", but since you asked:

1. Backslash is the native separator, whereas slash is not (see eryk
sun's post for *way* more detail).
2. People who routinely use slash have a tendency to forget to use
os.sep rather than a literal slash in places where it *does* matter.
3. Using slash, in my experience, ends up with paths with "mixed"
separators (os.path.join("C:/work/apps", "foo") ->
'C:/work/apps\\foo') which are messy to deal with, and ugly for the
user.
4. If a path with slashes is displayed directly to the user without
normalisation, it looks incorrect and can confuse users who are only
used to "native" Windows programs.

Etc.