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

[Nick Coghlan]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 01:31 PM 3/16/2007 +0100, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
>> Phillip J. Eby schrieb:
>>> 2. Add an optional flag argument to enable the new behavior
>> How would that help backwards compatibility?
> 
> All existing calls to splitext() would work the same way they've done
> for several years, and the documentation would now make it obvious to
> new users of the function that there's a choice about how to handle
> dotfiles.  Heck, we could throw in another optional argument to strip
> multiple extensions like .tar.gz.
> 

That may actually be a genuinely useful approach:

splitext(name, ignore_leading_dot=False, all_ext=False)

   Split the extension from a pathname. Returns "(root, ext)".
   By default, the extension is all characters from the last dot to the
end of the string. "ext" will be empty if there are no dots in the name
and "root" will be empty if the characters starts with a single dot and
that is the only dot in the name.
   If ignore_leading_dot=True, then a leading dot is always considered
part of "root", and is ignored when determining the extension. "root"
will never be empty in this case.
   If all_ext=True, the extension is all characters from the first dot to
the end.

> For that matter, the documentation should address the issue that no matter
> what options you use, you may *still* end up with unexpected results,
> for files like "Release 1.2", due to the fuzzy nature of the concept
> of a file
> "extension" on modern OSes.

Not sure what can be done about that... although such filenames are 
likely a big reason why grabbing 'all extensions' will typically be a 
bad idea.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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