equivalent of Ruby's Pathname?

Sean DiZazzo half.italian at gmail.com
Thu Feb 4 22:10:31 EST 2010


On Feb 3, 6:08 pm, alex23 <wuwe... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 4, 8:47 am, Phlip <phlip2... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Yes, calling os.path.walk() and os.path.join() all the time on raw
> > strings is fun, but I seem to recall from my Ruby days a class called
> > Pathname, which presented an object that behaved like a string at
> > need, and like a filesystem path at need. path + 'folder' would
> > call .join() and insert the / correctly, for example.
>
> > What's the best equivalent in Python-land?
>
> It's no longer supported, but the 3rd party 'path' module used to be
> the go-to module for this:
>
> >>> from path import path
>
> C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\path.py:32: DeprecationWarning: the md5
> module is deprecated; use hashlib instead
>   import sys, warnings, os, fnmatch, glob, shutil, codecs, md5>>> c = path('C:\\')
> >>> c.listdir()
>
> [path(u'C:\\AUTOEXEC.BAT'), path(u'C:\\boot.ini'), ...]>>> (c + 'python26').listdir()
>
> [path(u'C:\\python26\\circuits.pth_disabled_for_egg'), path(u'C:\
> \python26\\DLLs'), ...]>>> (c / 'python26').listdir()
>
> [path(u'C:\\python26\\circuits.pth_disabled_for_egg'), path(u'C:\
> \python26\\DLLs'), ...]
>
> I've hand edited the results for brevity...
>
> The module could do with some TLC to bring it up to date, but warning
> aside it still seems to work fine under 2.6.
>
> (From memory, I think the original author gave up when it became clear
> it would never be integrated into the standard lib[1], which is a
> shame, I think there's scope for a pathtools addition to the lib that
> provides this level of convenience...)
>
> There was also a PEP with another possible implementation:http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0355/
>
> Hope this helps.

It's too bad that something like this can't be agreed to.  I used a
homegrown module like this for a couple of years in my early days with
python.  It was great, but I didn't know enough at the time to make it
really useful.

Why did Path() get rejected?  Is it the idea itself, or just the
approach that was used?  What are the complaints?

~Sean



More information about the Python-list mailing list