What's the perfect (OS independent) way of storing filepaths ?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 14:35:01 +0200, Stef Mientki wrote:

> hello,
> 
> I (again) wonder what's the perfect way to store, OS-independent,
> filepaths ?

"Perfect"? I can't imagine any scheme which will work on every imaginable 
OS, past present and future.

However, in practice I think there are two common forms still in use: 
Posix paths, and Windows paths. I believe that OS/2 can deal with Windows 
pathnames, and Mac OS X uses Posix paths (I think...). If you have to 
support Classic Mac OS or other non-Posix systems, then your life will 
become interesting and complicated.

And let's not even consider Unicode issues...

You might find this page useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(computing)

Note that raw strings are for regular expressions, not Windows paths. Raw 
strings can't end in a backslash, so you can't do this:

r'C:\My Documents\'

Instead, you can avoid having to escape backslashes by taking advantage 
of the fact that Windows will accept forward slashes as well as 
backslashes as path separators, and write 'C:/My Documents/' instead.

I assume you're familiar with the path-manipulation utilities in os.path?

>>> import os
>>> os.path.splitdrive('C://My Documents/My File.txt')
('C:\\\\', 'My Documents\\My File.txt')

I had to fake the above output because I'm not running Windows, so excuse 
me if I got it wrong.

But honestly, I think your biggest problem isn't finding a platform-
independent way of storing paths, but simply translating between each 
OS's conventions on where files should be stored.

In Linux, config files should go into:

~/.<appname>/ or /etc/<appname>/

In Windows (which versions?) then should go into the Documents And 
Settings folder, where ever that is.

There's no single string which can represent both of these conventions!



-- 
Steven