Neil Mitchell wrote:
I guess most people saw this coming, but here is the proposal to add System.FilePath to base. The System.FilePath module is located at http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/projects/libraries.php#filepath
Some comments about the documentation:
searchPathSeparator :: Char A list of possible file separators, between the $PATH variable
Should be: "The character that is used to separate the entries in the $PATH environment variable."
addExtension :: FilePath -> String -> FilePath Add an extension, even if there is already one there. E.g. addExtension "foo.txt" "bat" -> "foo.txt.bat". addExtension "file.txt" "bib" == "file.txt.bib" addExtension "file." ".bib" == "file..bib" addExtension "file" ".bib" == "file.bib" Windows: addExtension "\\\\share" ".txt" == "\\\\share\\.txt"
I don't understand the last example. Is that because "\\\\xyz" where "xyz" contains no pathSeparator can never be a file? What, then, is the result of (addExtension "/" "x")? What, in general, is the behavior in case the first argument ends with a path separator? Speaking generally, for many functions I miss a precise description of the semantics that includes all the corner cases. This would (IMHO) be even more useful than the examples. It would also be nice to have principles explained somewhere, e.g. "In order to be easily reversible, splitting never discards separator characters. Instead these remain with either the first element of the result pair (for directory-filename splits) or the second element (for filename-extension splits)". I'm not sure if this principle is really generally followed, but if it is, then this and similar explanations would be very useful. It would also help to have guiding principles for the usual corner cases, like (see above) what happens with adjacent path and extension separators. Ben