Reading/Writing files

[Westley Martínez]

On Fri, 2011-03-25 at 05:39 -0700, Ethan Furman wrote:
> On 3/18/2011 6:25 PM, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 4:00 PM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us
> > <mailto:ethan at stoneleaf.us>> wrote:
> >
> >     Dan Stromberg wrote:
> >
> >
> >         Are you on windows?
> >
> >         You probably should use / as your directory separator in Python,
> >         not \.  In Python, and most other programming languages, \
> >         starts an escape sequence, so to introduce a literal \, you
> >         either need to prefix your string with r (r"\foo\bar") or double
> >         your backslashes ("\\foo\\bar").
> >
> >         / works fine on windows, and doesn't require escaping ("/foo/bar").
> >
> >
> >     Depends on your definition of 'fine'.
> >
> >     --> from glob import glob
> >     --> from pprint import pprint as pp
> >     --> pp(glob('c:/temp/*.pdf'))
> >     ['c:/temp\\choose_python.pdf',
> >     'c:/temp\\COA.pdf',
> >     'c:/temp\\job_setup.pdf']
> >
> >     Visually ugly, and a pain to compare files and paths.
> >
> >
> > I argue that the first is quite a bit more readable than the second:
> > 'c:/temp/choose_python.pdf'
> >     os.path.join([ 'c:', 'temp', 'choose_python.pdf' ])
> 
> I agree with your argument, but think that
>      r'c:\temp\choose_python.pdf'
> is even more readable still.  (Also, it wasn't I that suggested using
> os.path.join() on everything.)
> 
> 
> > Also, heard of os.path.normpath?  You probably shouldn't compare
> > pathnames without it.
> 
> Thanks -- I've heard of it (mostly in the context of resolving relative 
> path names (.. and such)), never checked it out... I'll read up on it.
> 
> ~Ethan~

Yes, readability counts, but so does platform independence.