Behaviour of os.path.join

[Ben Bacarisse]

BlindAnagram <blindanagram at nowhere.com> writes:

> The issue that I raised here was whether the behaviour of os.path.join()
> in treating the Windows directory separator '\\' as an absolute path
> should be considered a bug.

You think it should be considered to be a relative path?  The only
meaning that would give you want you wanted from

  os.path.join(<something>, '\\')

would be to treat it as being relative to the drive and to the
directory.  In other words you want '\\' to be a synonym for '.'  The
usual meaning of '\\' (outside of this specific function) is "root on
the current drive" but that can't sensibly be appended to any path.

> The behaviour of join came up for me when I tried to use the os.path
> functions to create a path that could only ever be used as a directory
> and never a file.  The only way that I found to designate a path as a
> directory path was to add '\\' at the end.  But this doesn't work in
> using os.path becaause the other os.path functions just strip it off and
> turn the directories back into files.

Nothing about the name can turn a directory into a file (or vice versa).
If c:\x\y is a file, calling it c:\x\y\ won't change that, but it might
give you an error when you try to access it.  That may be what you want.
If so, appending '.' is likely to be more portable.

-- 
Ben.