the mystery of dirname()

[MRAB]

Shashwat Anand wrote:
> But this is posixpath, right ? So '//x' like path will not occur as far 
> as I guess ?
> 
Can you guarantee that? It's safer to just leave it as it is, just in
case! :-)

> On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 8:35 AM, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com 
> <mailto:python at mrabarnett.plus.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Shashwat Anand wrote:
> 
>         In the following code sample :
> 
>         def dirname(p):
> 
>            """Returns the directory component of a pathname"""
>            i = p.rfind('/') + 1
> 
>            head = p[:i]
>            if head and head != '/'*len(head):
> 
>                head = head.rstrip('/')
> 
>            return head
> 
>         def dirname1(p):
>           i = p.rfind('/') + 1
> 
>           head = p[:i]
>           if head != '/':
> 
>                return head.rstrip('/')       return head
> 
>         if __name__ == "__main__":
>           p1 = '/Users/l0nwlf/Desktop'
> 
>           p2 = './'
>           p3 = '/'
>           p4 = '.'
> 
>           print dirname(p1), dirname1(p1)
> 
>           print dirname(p2), dirname1(p2)
> 
>           print dirname(p3), dirname1(p3)
> 
>           print dirname(p4), dirname1(p4)
> 
>         OUTPUT:
> 
>         /Users/l0nwlf /Users/l0nwlf
>         . .
>         / /
> 
>         dirname() is a function taken from /Lib/posixpath.py. However i
>         did not quite understood the usage of "if head and head !=
>         '/'*len(head):" and replaced it with more obvious way in dirname1().
> 
>         Am I right to do so ? Is dirname1() more pythonic ? Did I missed
>         any edge cases here ?
> 
>     What if the path is '//x'? The current dirname would return '//',
>     whereas dirname1 would return ''.
>