RE: [boost] Re: the first version of abstract path manipulation c lass (interface)

From: John Maddock (John_Maddock_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-01-30 07:07:37

>It depends. Many times yes. Much of the software I have worked on recently

>needed to create and store paths that worked on UNIX and Windows. Since 
>Windows handles forward slashes but UNIX doesn't handle backslashes we 
>converted everything to forward slashes.
>
>Even without that need though, if I create a directory programmatically
but 
>part of the name comes from the user then I could easily have mixed 
>separators. For instance, if the user entered "projects\myclass.cpp" and I

>appended that to "/home/jason" then the result is 
>"/home/jason/projects\myclass.cpp". To convert this to backslashes, the 
>policy needs to recognize that both slash and backslash are valid 
>separators on Win32.

Surely the whole point is that we would use the pathname class to handle
programmatic creation of pathnames:

pathname path; // current directory
path.join(foo).join(bar);
std::cout << path;

prints ./foo/bar on unix but .\foo\bar on win32 and :foo:bar on the mac.

- John Maddock
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/john_maddock/