[Python-ideas] URLs/URIs + pathlib.Path + literal syntax = ?

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 6:55 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30 March 2016 at 05:23, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 4)  Path("file:///http://www.example.com")
>>
>> Oops, my bad - I forgot about the third slash. It comes to the same
>> thing, though; for most paths, you can deduce that a prefix "http://"
>> implies that it's not a file path, and for the rare case when you do
>> mean that, you can explicitly adorn it.
>
> I presume you're deliberately ignoring the fact that most paths come
> from variables, not from literals, and many come from user input
> (sometimes even unintended user input such as a "*" expanded by the
> shell)? It's easy enough to rewrite literals to be unambiguous, but in
> order to do so for arbitrary input you need to basically implement
> (part of) a URI parser...

Not quite; what I'm saying is that *any* file path can be made
unambiguous by prepending "file:///", thus guaranteeing that it will
be parsed correctly. I'm not sure that this is necessarily a good
thing, but it's in response to the objection that a magic prefix
"http://" would introduce an impossibility.

ChrisA