Simplified Path declarations

[HalfWhitt]

This might very well be a solution for a non-problem, but I noticed that a lot of paths in the codebase are written with all slash operators, like this:

Path.home() / "does" / "not" / "exist" / "image.jpg"
Path("does") / "not" / "exist" / "image.jpg"

All this PR does is simplify all such instances , e.g.:

Path.home() / "does/not/exist/image.jpg"
Path("does/not/exist/image.jpg")

This avoids creating and discarding intermediate Path objects along the way, and at least personally I find it more readable too.

In the event that this is an intentional style decision, I could submit a PR that instead changes all of the latter style to the former, for consistency.

PR Checklist:

• All new features have been tested
• All new features have been documented
• I have read the CONTRIBUTING.md file
• I will abide by the code of conduct

[freakboy3742]

In the event that this is an intentional style decision, I could submit a PR that instead changes all of the latter style to the former, for consistency.

So ... it was intentional, for two reasons:

1. Having the / operator provides an easy split point for Black to work on, rather than needing to split long paths.
2. Windows :-)

(1) is a relatively minor cosmetic detail; but (2) is more substantial. I was under the impression that using an explicit / operator avoided any potential ambiguity around Windows path separators.

However, if that's not the case, and you can provide documented evidence that the forward-slash handling in Path objects is intentionally cross-platform, then I don't object to collapsing the paths to a simpler "single string" form where it clearly improves readability.

[HalfWhitt]

I'm pretty certain that treating / inside strings as a platform-independent separator is one of benefits of pathlib over all the os.path.join shenanigans it replaces.

Oddly enough, looking now I see that this isn't explicitly claimed in the docs, but it is demonstrated by the examples, for instance:

The string representation of a path is the raw filesystem path itself (in native form, e.g. with backslashes under Windows), which you can pass to any function taking a file path as a string:

p = PurePath('/etc')
str(p)
'/etc'
p = PureWindowsPath('c:/Program Files')
str(p)
'c:\\Program Files'

Many other examples there show creation of Windows paths using forward slashes.

(Rest in peace, os.path.join. Please don't come back.)

[HalfWhitt]

Not sure if a more-explicit-but-less-authoritative source is relevant, but Trey Hunner talks about it in the second of his pair of pathlib-prozelytizing posts that I liked sharing around, especially when pathlib was quite new and many hadn't used it yet.

[freakboy3742]

The combination of a weak docs reference, Trey's opinion, and a test suite passing on Windows is enough to convince me. Thanks for the cleanup!

[mhsmith]

Thanks for doing this – if you feel ambitious, you could try doing the same in Briefcase. 😄

[HalfWhitt]

Don't mind if I do : )