Unicode Chars in Windows Path

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 5:41 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> On 4/2/2014 11:10 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 1:37 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Windows accepts both forward and backslashes in file names.
>>
>>
>> Small clarification: The Windows *API* accepts both types of slash
>
>
> To me, that is what Steven said.

Yes, which is why I said "clarification" not "correction".

>> (you can open a file using forward slashes, for instance), but not all
>> Windows *applications* are aware of this (generally only
>> cross-platform ones take notice of this), and most Windows *users*
>> prefer backslashes.
>
>
> Do you have a source for that?

Hardly need one for the first point - it's proven by a single Windows
application that parses a path name by dividing it on backslashes.
Even if there isn't one today, I could simply write one, and prove my
own point trivially (albeit not usefully). Anything that simply passes
its arguments to an API (eg it just opens the file) won't need to take
notice of slash type, but otherwise, it's very *VERY* common for a
Windows program to assume that it can split paths manually.

The second point would be better sourced, yes, but all I can say is
that I've written programs that use and display slashes, and had
non-programmers express surprise at it; similarly when you see certain
programs that take one part of a path literally, and then build on it
with either type of slash, like zip and unzip - if you say "zip -r
C:\Foo\Bar", it'll tell you that it's archiving
C:\Foo\Bar/Quux/Asdf.txt and so on. Definitely inspires surprise in
non-programmers.

ChrisA