relative-path

Portable relative UTF-8 paths for Rust.

This provide a module analogous to [std::path], with the following characteristics:

• The path separator is set to a fixed character (/), regardless of platform.
• Relative paths cannot represent a path in the filesystem without first specifying what they are relative to through [to_path].
• Relative paths are always guaranteed to be a UTF-8 string.

On top of this we support many path-like operations that guarantee portable behavior.

Serde Support

This library includes serde support that can be enabled with the serde feature.

Why is std::path a portability hazard?

Path representations differ across platforms.

• Windows permits using drive volumes (multiple roots) as a prefix (e.g. "c:\") and backslash (\) as a separator.
• Unix references absolute paths from a single root and uses slash (/) as a separator.

If we use PathBuf, Storing paths like this in a manifest would happily allow our applications to build and run on one platform, but potentially not others.

Consider the following manifest:

```rust use std::path::PathBuf; use serde::{Serialize, Deserialize};

[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]

struct Manifest { source: PathBuf, } ```

Which represents this TOML file:

```toml

Uh oh, trouble.

source = "C:\path\to\source" ```

Assuming "C:\\path\\to\\source" is a legal path on Windows, this will happily run for one platform when checked into source control but not others.

Since [RelativePath] strictly uses / as a separator it avoids this issue. Anything non-slash will simply be considered part of a distinct component.

Conversion to [Path] may only happen if it is known which path it is relative to through the [to_path] function. This is where the relative part of the name comes from.

```rust use relative_path::RelativePath; use std::path::Path;

let relativepath = RelativePath::new("foo/bar"); let path = Path::new("C:\"); let fullpath = relativepath.topath(path); ```

This would permit relative paths to portably be used in project manifests or configurations. Where files are referenced from some specific, well-known point in the filesystem.

toml source = "path/to/source"

The fixed manifest would look like this:

```rust use relative_path::RelativePathBuf; use serde::{Serialize, Deserialize};

[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]

pub struct Manifest { source: RelativePathBuf, } ```

Overview

When two relative paths are compared to each other, their exact component makeup determines equality.

```rust use relative_path::RelativePath;

assert_ne!( RelativePath::new("foo/bar/../baz"), RelativePath::new("foo/baz") ); ```

Using platform-specific path separators to construct relative paths is not supported.

Path separators from other platforms are simply treated as part of a component:

```rust use relative_path::RelativePath;

assert_ne!( RelativePath::new("foo/bar"), RelativePath::new("foo\bar") );

asserteq!(1, RelativePath::new("foo\bar").components().count()); asserteq!(2, RelativePath::new("foo/bar").components().count()); ```

To see if two relative paths are equivalent you can use [normalize]:

```rust use relative_path::RelativePath;

assert_eq!( RelativePath::new("foo/bar/../baz").normalize(), RelativePath::new("foo/baz").normalize(), ); ```

Additional portability notes

While relative paths avoid the most egregious portability issues, namely that absolute paths will work equally unwell on all platforms. We do not avoid all.

This section tries to document additional portability issues that we know about.

[RelativePath], similarly to [Path], makes no guarantees that the components represented in them makes up legal file names. While components are strictly separated by slashes, we can still store things in path components which may not be used as legal paths on all platforms.

• NUL is not permitted on unix platforms - this is a terminator in C-based filesystem APIs. Slash (/) is also used as a path separator.
• Windows has a number of reserved characters and names.

As a relative path is converted, it's simply performed as a series of [Path::push] calls, one for each component. This can cause varying results for each platform - i.e. a component containing a backslash on Windows would be seen as two separate components once converted. This highlights the need to perform as many operations on relative paths as possible, rather then converting them first to their [std::path] equivalents.