hpath/README.md

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Fork chrisdone's path library I wasn't happy with the way it dealt with Dir vs File things. In his version of the library, a `Path b Dir` always ends with a trailing path separator and `Path b File` never ends with a trailing path separator. IMO, it is nonsensical to make a Dir vs File distinction on path level, although it first seems nice. Some of the reasons are: * a path is just that: a path. It is completely disconnected from IO level and even if a `Dir`/`File` type theoretically allows us to say "this path ought to point to a file", there is literally zero guarantee that it will hold true at runtime. So this basically gives a false feeling of a type-safe file distinction. * it's imprecise about Dir vs File distinction, which makes it even worse, because a directory is also a file (just not a regular file). Add symlinks to that and the confusion is complete. * it makes the API oddly complicated for use cases where we basically don't care (yet) whether something turns out to be a directory or not Still, it comes also with a few perks: * it simplifies some functions, because they now have guarantees whether a path ends in a trailing path separator or not * it may be safer for interaction with other library functions, which behave differently depending on a trailing path separator (like probably shelly) Not limited to, but also in order to fix my remarks without breaking any benefits, I did: * rename the `Dir`/`File` types to `TPS`/`NoTPS`, so it's clear we are only giving information about trailing path separators and not actual file types we don't know about yet * add a `MaybeTPS` type, which does not mess with trailing path separators and also gives no guarantees about them... then added `toNoTPS` and `toTPS` to allow type-safe conversion * make some functions accept more general types, so we don't unnecessarily force paths with trailing separators for `(</>)` for example... instead these functions now examine the paths to still have correct behavior. This is really minor overhead. You might say now "but then I can append filepath to filepath". Well, as I said... we don't know whether it's a "filepath" at all. * merge `filename` and `dirname` into `basename` and make `parent` be `dirname`, so the function names match the name of the POSIX ones, which do (almost) the same... * fix a bug in `basename` (formerly `dirname`) which broke the type guarantees * add a pattern synonym for easier pattern matching without exporting the internal Path constructor
2016-03-08 21:53:42 +00:00
# HPath
2015-05-08 12:35:05 +00:00
2016-05-18 23:29:08 +00:00
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2016-05-09 16:06:40 +00:00
2016-05-09 11:31:20 +00:00
Support for well-typed paths in Haskell. Also provides ByteString based filepath
manipulation.
## Motivation
Fork chrisdone's path library I wasn't happy with the way it dealt with Dir vs File things. In his version of the library, a `Path b Dir` always ends with a trailing path separator and `Path b File` never ends with a trailing path separator. IMO, it is nonsensical to make a Dir vs File distinction on path level, although it first seems nice. Some of the reasons are: * a path is just that: a path. It is completely disconnected from IO level and even if a `Dir`/`File` type theoretically allows us to say "this path ought to point to a file", there is literally zero guarantee that it will hold true at runtime. So this basically gives a false feeling of a type-safe file distinction. * it's imprecise about Dir vs File distinction, which makes it even worse, because a directory is also a file (just not a regular file). Add symlinks to that and the confusion is complete. * it makes the API oddly complicated for use cases where we basically don't care (yet) whether something turns out to be a directory or not Still, it comes also with a few perks: * it simplifies some functions, because they now have guarantees whether a path ends in a trailing path separator or not * it may be safer for interaction with other library functions, which behave differently depending on a trailing path separator (like probably shelly) Not limited to, but also in order to fix my remarks without breaking any benefits, I did: * rename the `Dir`/`File` types to `TPS`/`NoTPS`, so it's clear we are only giving information about trailing path separators and not actual file types we don't know about yet * add a `MaybeTPS` type, which does not mess with trailing path separators and also gives no guarantees about them... then added `toNoTPS` and `toTPS` to allow type-safe conversion * make some functions accept more general types, so we don't unnecessarily force paths with trailing separators for `(</>)` for example... instead these functions now examine the paths to still have correct behavior. This is really minor overhead. You might say now "but then I can append filepath to filepath". Well, as I said... we don't know whether it's a "filepath" at all. * merge `filename` and `dirname` into `basename` and make `parent` be `dirname`, so the function names match the name of the POSIX ones, which do (almost) the same... * fix a bug in `basename` (formerly `dirname`) which broke the type guarantees * add a pattern synonym for easier pattern matching without exporting the internal Path constructor
2016-03-08 21:53:42 +00:00
The motivation came during development of
[hsfm](https://github.com/hasufell/hsfm)
which has a pretty strict File type, but lacks a strict Path type, e.g.
for user input.
The library that came closest to my needs was
[path](https://github.com/chrisdone/path),
but the API turned out to be oddly complicated for my use case, so I
decided to fork it.
2016-05-09 11:31:20 +00:00
Similarly, [posix-paths](https://github.com/JohnLato/posix-paths)
was exactly what I wanted for the low-level operations, but upstream seems dead,
so it is forked as well and merged into this library.
2016-05-09 15:37:33 +00:00
## Goals
* well-typed paths
* high-level API to file operations like recursive directory copy
* safe filepath manipulation, never using String as filepath, but ByteString
* still allowing sufficient control to interact with the underlying low-level calls
2016-05-24 13:55:36 +00:00
Note: this library was written for __posix__ systems and it will probably not support other systems.
Fork chrisdone's path library I wasn't happy with the way it dealt with Dir vs File things. In his version of the library, a `Path b Dir` always ends with a trailing path separator and `Path b File` never ends with a trailing path separator. IMO, it is nonsensical to make a Dir vs File distinction on path level, although it first seems nice. Some of the reasons are: * a path is just that: a path. It is completely disconnected from IO level and even if a `Dir`/`File` type theoretically allows us to say "this path ought to point to a file", there is literally zero guarantee that it will hold true at runtime. So this basically gives a false feeling of a type-safe file distinction. * it's imprecise about Dir vs File distinction, which makes it even worse, because a directory is also a file (just not a regular file). Add symlinks to that and the confusion is complete. * it makes the API oddly complicated for use cases where we basically don't care (yet) whether something turns out to be a directory or not Still, it comes also with a few perks: * it simplifies some functions, because they now have guarantees whether a path ends in a trailing path separator or not * it may be safer for interaction with other library functions, which behave differently depending on a trailing path separator (like probably shelly) Not limited to, but also in order to fix my remarks without breaking any benefits, I did: * rename the `Dir`/`File` types to `TPS`/`NoTPS`, so it's clear we are only giving information about trailing path separators and not actual file types we don't know about yet * add a `MaybeTPS` type, which does not mess with trailing path separators and also gives no guarantees about them... then added `toNoTPS` and `toTPS` to allow type-safe conversion * make some functions accept more general types, so we don't unnecessarily force paths with trailing separators for `(</>)` for example... instead these functions now examine the paths to still have correct behavior. This is really minor overhead. You might say now "but then I can append filepath to filepath". Well, as I said... we don't know whether it's a "filepath" at all. * merge `filename` and `dirname` into `basename` and make `parent` be `dirname`, so the function names match the name of the POSIX ones, which do (almost) the same... * fix a bug in `basename` (formerly `dirname`) which broke the type guarantees * add a pattern synonym for easier pattern matching without exporting the internal Path constructor
2016-03-08 21:53:42 +00:00
## Differences to 'path'
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* doesn't attempt to fake IO-related information into the path, so whether a path points to a file or directory is up to your IO-code to decide...
2016-04-16 16:17:44 +00:00
* trailing path separators will be preserved if they exist, no messing with that
* uses safe ByteString for filepaths under the hood instead of unsafe String
* fixes broken [dirname](https://github.com/chrisdone/path/issues/18)
* renames dirname/filename to basename/dirname to match the POSIX shell functions
* introduces a new `Path Fn` for safe filename guarantees and a `RelC` class
* allows pattern matching via unidirectional PatternSynonym
* uses simple doctest for testing
* allows `~/` as relative path, because on posix level `~` is just a regular filename that does _NOT_ point to `$HOME`
* remove TH, it sucks
2016-05-09 11:31:20 +00:00
## Differences to 'posix-paths'
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* uses the `word8` package for save word8 literals instead of `OverloadedStrings`
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* `hasTrailingPathSeparator` and `dropTrailingPathSeparator` behave in the same way as their `System.FilePath` counterpart
* added various functions:
* `equalFilePath`
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* `getSearchPath`
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* `hasParentDir`
* `hiddenFile`
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* `isFileName`
* `isValid`
* `makeRelative`
* `makeValid`
* `normalise`
* `splitSearchPath`
* `stripExtension`
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* has a custom versions of `openFd` which allows more control over the flags than its unix package counterpart
* adds a `getDirectoryContents'` version that works on Fd
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## Examples in ghci
Start ghci via `cabal repl`:
```hs
-- enable OverloadedStrings
:set -XOverloadedStrings
-- import HPath.IO
import HPath.IO
-- parse an absolute path
abspath <- parseAbs "/home"
-- parse a relative path (e.g. user users home directory)
relpath <- parseRel "jule"
-- concatenate paths
let newpath = abspath </> relpath
-- get file type
getFileType newpath
-- return all contents of that directory
getDirsFiles newpath
-- return all contents of the parent directory
getDirsFiles (dirname newpath)
```