os.path.split: processing paths from one OS on another

[Eddie Corns]

Martijn Ras <ras at holmes.nl> writes:

>Heya folks,

>I ran into the following problem:

>When i run this on Windows everything is as expected:
>C:\>python
>Python 2.2.3 (#42, May 30 2003, 18:12:08) [MSC 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
>Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
> >>> import os
> >>> file='/TEST/FILE.EXT'
> >>> print os.path.split(file)
>('/TEST', 'FILE.EXT')
> >>> file='C:\\TEST\\FILE.EXT'
> >>> print os.path.split(file)
>('C:\\TEST', 'FILE.EXT')

>However, when i run this on Linux the results are unexpected:
>$ python
>Python 2.2.3 (#1, Nov 12 2003, 15:53:11)
>[GCC 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.3 2.96-110)] on linux2
>Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
> >>> import os
> >>> file='/TEST/FILE.EXT'
> >>> print os.path.split(file)
>('/TEST', 'FILE.EXT')
> >>> file='C:\\TEST\\FILE.EXT'
> >>> print os.path.split(file)
>('', 'C:\\TEST\\FILE')

Well, that is correct behaviour for any unix type machine because \ and C: are
just part of a filename, the only special character in a unix file name is /
(the directory separator).  So if the user is trying to specify a file on the 
unix system either they will need to use unix conventions or you will need to
do your own mapping from windowsland names to unixland names.  Since Python
already does the mapping in the opposite direction (ie making everything look
like a unix name) it might make more sense to adopt this convention.  Of
course, if your actual purpose is simply to manipulate filenames rather than
use the name to reference a file then you need to use the library functions
specific to the OS (in this case windows) which someone else has already
mentioned.

Eddie