search

lucasmeijer / NiceIO

For when you've had to use System.IO one time too many
MIT License
128 stars 19 forks source link

Empty path is converted to "." #15

Closed smilediver closed 7 years ago

smilediver commented 7 years ago

Currently new NPath("").ToString() returns ".". I think the result should be an empty string, because "an empty path, or relative to anything" and "path relative to current directory" have quite different semantic meanings. But I'm not 100% convinced myself. What do you think? This was introduced in 62deffd.

mrvoorhe commented 7 years ago

That is an interesting question. I can see how it's a bit unexpected.

I didn't make the change so I can't speak to the reasoning behind why the behavior was changed. One perspective I can see is that an NPath should always represent a path. An empty string is not a path, it's simply an empty string.

Allowing a NPath to be an empty string would create a niche state that a NPath could be in. I'm not sure what you would even do with a NPath who's ToString() value was an empty string. It feels like that would just "force" error checking onto the user of the API because trying to use an empty string path is not going to work out well.