[Python-ideas] Small enhancement to os.path.splitext

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 11:42 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20 April 2010 17:47, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am not sure to follow the issue. Do you mean that in the same filesystem,
>> each directory can treat case sensivity differently ? I wasn't aware of that.
>
> Apologies, I was unclear (I was trying to avoid the term "filesystem"
> which isn't an obvious concept on Windows). Putting it more simply,
> you need to be able to determine the case sensitivity of the
> filesystem to determine if a file "has extension .xxx".
>
>> How would this affect the extension btw ?   I can imagine that
>> the path+extensions could to be normalized before the matching job, but
>> I don't see other issue, do you have an example ?
>
> As Mike Meyer explained, whether file foo.C "has extension .c" depends
> (as far as the user is concerned) on whether the filesystem it's on is
> case sensitive.
>
> Many unix utility ports on Windows don't consider this, and they are
> quite annoying when the problem hits you (which admittedly isn't that
> often). Having an os.path.has_extension function in Python which
> doesn't consider case sensitivity would be an attractive nuisance,
> encouraging people to write subtly broken code like this. I'm -1 on
> such a function.
>
> Having said that, if you can write a function which detects filesystem
> case sensitivity (and write a "correct" has_extension function based
> on it), you'd be my hero (I believe it's a pretty difficult issue, if
> not impossible in the general case).

Ok well, I doubt I'll be your hero, this is way over my head ;)

The only simple way that comes in my mind is to write a test file to
try it out but that's a hack

But being able to detect it sounds like something we should definitely
have in os/os.path.



>
> Paul.
>



-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org