[Python-ideas] Updated PEP 428 (pathlib)

[Andrew Barnert]

From: "random832 at fastmail.us" <random832 at fastmail.us>

Sent: Wednesday, March 6, 2013 11:15 AM


> On Wed, Mar 6, 2013, at 13:28, Andrew Barnert wrote:
>>  The problem is that I think people will still want a
>>  stripext/stem/root/whatever function that removes the extension without
>>  also removing the dirname. In fact, I've got a script here where one of
>>  my coworkers has written $(dirname $z)/$(basename $z .zip) to get around
>>  it.
…


> Well, whatever you do is competing with p[:-len('.gz')]

Only the "remove extension by name" is competing with that. The "remove any and all extensions" or "remove 1 extension" or "remove n extensions" cases—which I think are more common—are not. Of course they _are_ competing with various uses of partition/rpartition/split/rsplit. But you could make the same argument for everything in a path library—p.dirname() is competing with p.rpartition(pathsep)[0], and 'p / 'foo' is competing with p + pathsep + 'foo', and so on.

As I understand it, the reason to have a path API is to provide a "one way to do it" that's obvious, readable, and hard to get wrong. And I think p.stripext('.gz') or p.stripext(2) or p.stripext() are better than p[:-len('.gz')] or p.rsplit('.', 2)[0] or p.partition('.')[0] in that regard.

Except for the name, which nobody's come up with a good suggestion for, and the fact that we probably don't want to cram all three versions of the operation into one function, or even necessarily support all three at all.

> (and in shell,
> your co-worker could have done ${z%.zip} in ksh/bash/POSIX) - unless you
> have an example of an OS where the 'extension' component doesn't 
> simply
> append at the end (well, I suppose they're not case-sensitive on windows
> - and how much weird long/short filename stuff does pathlib do on
> windows?)

Funnily enough, according to a comment, this was intended to handle all-caps .ZIP on Windows under cygwin. I don't know if it actually works (or, for that matter, if %.zip would have worked), as I don't have a Windows box with cygwin installed handy. But that's beside the point. The point is that people want a method that removes extensions (whether by name or otherwise) that doesn't also remove dirnames. And if you force them to come up with such a method themselves, they're not necessarily going to come up with a good one. I'm sure if we had your extended basename but no stripext, someone would write p.dirname()/p.basename('.zip').