file path portability

Question

I have a program that I need to run under *nix and windows. because the program takes file paths from files the issue is what to do about the \ vs / issue.

My current thought is to put in a regex that converts the wrong one to the right one depending on what system I'm on. This will have the effect of letting either type work on either system. Aside from the fact that now I have two problems, does anyone see any other problems?

(Other better solutions are more than welcome)

Edit: the primary issue is getting windows paths to work on unix rather than the other way around.

Answer 1

The / is fully supported in win32 too.

Also see this related question

Answer 2

Windows will generally accept either \ or /,so standardizing on / may make your problem simpler as long as you have complete control over the filenames.

Answer 3

Have you considered creating a "file manager" class that will handle all of the file pathing issues for you? That way in your mail application, when you're loading a data file, you can call something like this.

LoadApplicationData(FileManager.GetDataFilePath)

Then your file manager will detect the environment that it is in and return the proper file path option. That way you can also accomodate for Win32 vs. Unix locatio standards (like Program Files vs /usr or whatever) as well.

Answer 4

Note that Win32 paths are complex when you consider drive letters (no analog on Unix) and the special 'forks' (MacOS pre-X term - likewise no analog on Unix in general, though MacOS X has them - surprise, surprise) that can be provided. Be careful.

Answer 5

Create a parser for your input to create a tree structure of nodes representing directories. Then you can 'save' by walking the tree and writing whatever delimiters you want or optionally doing different things, like checking if the directory exists or writing meta files. This is actually something that I am just now thinking would be useful for my own application :-)

Answer 6

You didn't say what language you are using, so I'm going to selfishly assume c/c++. boost, if you are willing to use it, has a filesystem library. Of course, if you are using a dynamic language, FS abstraction libraries probably already exist there too (e.g. in perl, File::Spec is quite standard).