Crate typed_path

Expand description

Typed Path

Provides typed variants of Path and PathBuf for Unix and Windows.

Install

[dependencies]
typed-path = "0.1"

Why?

Some applications need to manipulate Windows or UNIX paths on different platforms, for a variety of reasons: constructing portable file formats, parsing files from other platforms, handling archive formats, working with certain network protocols, and so on.

– Josh Triplett

Check out this issue of a discussion for this. The functionality actually exists within the standard library, but is not exposed!

This means that parsing a path like C:\path\to\file.txt will be parsed differently by std::path::Path depending on which platform you are on!

use std::path::Path;

fn main() {
    // On Windows, this prints out:
    //
    // * Prefix(PrefixComponent { raw: "C:", parsed: Disk(67) })
    // * RootDir
    // * Normal("path")
    // * Normal("to")
    // * Normal("file.txt")]
    //
    // But on Unix, this prints out:
    //
    // * Normal("C:\\path\\to\\file.txt")
    println!(
        "{:?}",
        Path::new(r"C:\path\to\file.txt")
            .components()
            .collect::<Vec<_>>()
    );
}

The library provides a generic Path<T> and PathBuf<T> that use [u8] and Vec<u8> underneath instead of OsStr and OsString. An encoding generic type is provided to dictate how the underlying bytes are parsed in order to support consistent path functionality no matter what operating system you are compiling against!

use typed_path::WindowsPath;

fn main() {
    // On all platforms, this prints out:
    //
    // * Prefix(PrefixComponent { raw: "C:", parsed: Disk(67) })
    // * RootDir
    // * Normal("path")
    // * Normal("to")
    // * Normal("file.txt")]
    //
    println!(
        "{:?}",
        WindowsPath::new(r"C:\path\to\file.txt")
            .components()
            .collect::<Vec<_>>()
    );
}