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These functions have long sown confusion among Python developers. The existing documentation says they deal with URL path components, but that doesn't fit the evidence on Windows: >>> pathname2url(r'C:\foo') '///C:/foo' >>> pathname2url(r'\\server\share') '////server/share' # or '//server/share' as of quite recently If these were URL path components, they would imply complete URLs like `file://///C:/foo` and `file://////server/share`. Clearly this isn't right. Yet the implementation in `nturl2path` is deliberate, and the `url2pathname()` function correctly inverts it. On non-Windows platforms, the behaviour until quite recently is to simply quote/unquote the path without adding or removing any leading slashes. This behaviour is compatible with *both* interpretations -- 1) the value is a URL path component (existing docs), and 2) the value is everything following `file:` (this commit) The conclusion I draw is that these functions operate on everything after the `file:` prefix, which may include an authority section. This is the only explanation that fits both the Windows and non-Windows behaviour. It's also a better match for the function names.
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