On Tue, Jan 06, 2015 at 03:09:39AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Steven D'Aprano writes:
The model I am proposing is that of the os and os.path modules: we import os and it does the right thing for the current platform.
Which is normally "nothing" on POSIX, since the shell does it for you. Or, if you're talking about what the shell does for you, while I suppose there is a basic globbing defined by POSIX, but bash and zsh go well beyond that, and they behave somewhat differently in corner cases IIRC.
All correct.
If the program is going to invoke a globbing function specifically, I suppose it makes sense to default to the same behavior as on the current platform, but it's not obvious that that's what the user wants. I use bash on Windows; why settle for cmd.exe if you want the power of the command line? It could even cause problems (is there a reliable way to determine what the shell is, let alone whether it implements globbing or not, on Windows?)
I see that as an application issue, not a Python issue. As the author of the application, I have some flexibility: - Currently, I can not use glob.py at all, and my Unix users will be able to use globs, but most of my Windows users won't. - If I unconditionally use glob.py, my Unix users can not reliably specify filenames containing wildcards but my Windows users may (assuming that glob supports escaping, which it currently doesn't). - I can conditionally use glob or not, depending on the platform. - Or I can provide an application switch/preference which allows the user to decide whether to use wildcards or not. I don't know of any reliable way for a Python script to determine the current shell (there may not even be a shell!). If such a way exists, that would be good functionality to have.
In particular, os.path will do the right thing for the current platform, but you can import ntpath, posixpath, genericpath etc. to get behaviour for a specific platform.
But there *is* a RightThang for paths; the OS decides. Globbing is a user preference thing.
Not entirely user-preference. As Random's discussion has pointed out, there are issues with the way globbing is currently handled. For example, Windows doesn't support [...] wildcards and so most Windows users will expect to be able to specify [ and ] as ordinary characters. You can't do that with glob.py. Windows users who have bash installed are a very small minority :-) -- Steven