[New-bugs-announce] [issue44452] Allow paths to be joined without worrying about a leading slash

[Zbyszek Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

New submission from Zbyszek Jędrzejewski-Szmek <zbyszek at in.waw.pl>:

pathlib.Path.__truediv__(), i.e. pathlib.Path.joinpath() is surprising when the second argument starts with a slash.

>>> pathlib.Path('/foo') / '/bar'
>>> PosixPath('/bar')

I know that this follows the precedent set by os.path.join(), and
probably makes sense in some scenarios. But for the general operation
of "concatenating paths", it doesn't fit very well. In particular,
when concatenating multiple components this becomes even stranger:

>>> pathlib.Path('/var/tmp/instroot') / '/some/path' / '/suffix'
>>> PosixPath('/suffix')

In my particular use case, I'm concatenating some user specified paths
relative to some root. The paths may or may not be absolute.
 
To avoid this pitfall, something like this is necessary:

>>> pathlib.Path('/var/tmp/instroot') / p.lstrip('/') / q.lstrip('/')

Please provide a way to do this natively. I think it'd be nice to
use // or + for this:

>>> pathlib.Path('/var/tmp/instroot') // '/some/path' // '/suffix'
>>> PosixPath('/var/tmp/instroot/some/path/suffix')

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 396058
nosy: zbysz
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Allow paths to be joined without worrying about a leading slash
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.11

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue44452>
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