[Python-Dev] Proposal to revert r54204 (splitext change)

[Delaney, Timothy (Tim)]

"Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

> It's not "just" that people disliked the behavior. The majority of
> those 
> that commented agreed that the current behavior is incorrect. Some
> also 
> observed that the online documentation was underspecified, and indeed
> allowed for that change. So this is a bug fix, even though the old
> test 
> case explicitly tested for the presence of the bug, and even though
> the 
> doc string explicitly documented the old behavior. They were all
> consistent, but they were consistently wrong.

The patch special-cases one edge case where an "extension" does not indicate the type of the file, but metadata on a particular platform.

Here's a couple of other edge cases that are not addressed by the patch:

On Mac OS (including Mac OS X) you can have a file without an extension, where the type is specified in the metadata. However, such a file could also happen to contain a dot in the file name:

    splitext("Version 1.2") -> ("Version 1", "2")

Also, quite often you have multiple extensions:

    splitext("file.tar.gz") -> ("file.tar", "gz")

To me, the "extension" there is "tar.gz".

Basically, changing the behaviour of splitext() is simply trying to make it "do what I mean" (DWIM). But it's never going to DWIM. I think the best we can do is have a simple, unambiguous rule, with no exceptions - which is what the existing behaviour does.

Tim Delaney