Windows Path Robustness

[jacob314]

Conduct robust testing to fix failures with Windows-style backslashes and folder paths. Locate and resolve existing bug reports regarding path parsing failures.

[spencer426]

The normalizePath function was updated to consistently convert all path separators to forward slashes (/) on
all platforms, and to lowercase them on Windows. This fixes subtle bugs where mixed-separator paths (e.g.,
C:/Users\folder/file.txt) on Windows, or paths with native backslashes (), would cause downstream tools or
functions (especially those performing string-based path manipulation) to fail or behave unpredictably.

Example:
function getParentDir(path) that finds the last / to determine the parent.

• Before: For an input path like C:/Users/test\file.txt, the old normalizePath would produce
  c:\users\test\file.txt. Passing this to getParentDir (looking for /) would fail, returning an empty string
  instead of c:/users/test.
• After: The new normalizePath consistently converts C:/Users/test\file.txt to c:/users/test/file.txt.
  getParentDir then correctly identifies c:/users/test as the parent, ensuring robust and predictable path
  handling across the system.

 // Old normalization: C:/a/b\c.txt -> c:\a\b\c.txt (Windows)
  // New normalization: C:/a/b\c.txt -> c:/a/b/c.txt (Windows)
 
   //  function to get parent directory using string manipulation
    function getParentDir(p: string): string {
      const lastSlash = p.lastIndexOf('/');
      return lastSlash === -1 ? '' : p.substring(0, lastSlash);
    }
    
   // Scenario on Windows with input: "C:/a/b\\c.txt"
   
    // With OLD normalization:
    const oldPath = "c:\\a\\b\\c.txt"; // Result of old normalization
    console.log(`Old Parent: '${getParentDir(oldPath)}'`); // Output: '' (Incorrect)
   
   // With NEW normalization:
    const newPath = "c:/a/b/c.txt"; // Result of new normalization
    console.log(`New Parent: '${getParentDir(newPath)}'`); // Output: 'c:/a/b' (Correct)

The change should be safe for mac and linux

1. On macOS and Linux, the file path separator is already a forward slash (/). Backslashes
   () are not used as path separators, so the code that replaces \ with / will find nothing to change.

2. The code explicitly checks the platform before making any case changes:

return process.platform === 'win32' ? normalized.toLowerCase() : normalized;
On macOS or Linux, process.platform is not 'win32', so the path is returned with its case intact, which is
the correct and necessary behavior for these case-sensitive file systems.