Re: Windows paths in glob

On 2008-03-30 19:27, Martijn Lievaart <m@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:09:18 +0000, Dmitry wrote:
OK, so there's a well-known difficulty with handling Windows-style paths
in glob: it doesn't like backslashes, nor does it like spaces. One
solution to that is to use Unix-style paths:

glob('C:\Documents and Settings\*'); # Doesn't work
glob('C:/Documents\ and\ Settings/*'); # Works

I didn't expect that but on second thought it makes sense.


Problem is, the rest of Perl's built-in file-handling functionality
behaves the other way around. For instance, with -d:

-d 'C:\Documents and Settings'; # Works -d 'C:/Documents\ and\
Settings'; # Doesn't work

Question: is there any way to use the same path string with glob and
with the rest of Perl, without having to convert them back and forth?

I don't have Windows to test here, but I recall that using either a
forward slash '/' or a backward slash -- properly escaped -- '\\' works
either way in both situations.

You misunderstood the problem. The problem is that glob patterns, like
regexps are mini-languages where some characters (or sequences of
characters) have a special meaning. Just as you cannot just use any
string as a regexp and expect it to match itself (or even be a
well-formed regexp) you cannot use any filename as a glob pattern and
expect it to expand to itself. Actually, for globs the situation is
worse: While any string can be converted to a regexp matching that
string, this is not true for globs. Spaces can be escaped with a
backslash, but I didn't find any way to escape an asterisk or question
mark.

So I guess Gunnar's advice is the best: If you need to deal with
arbitrary file and directory names, avoid glob and use opendir/readdir.
Or maybe File::Find or a similar module (which uses opendir/readdir
internally).

hp
.

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