Pathy

Pathy is a library for safe, typed path manipulation.

Type axes

Paths are either absolute or relative and point at directories or files.

Combining these two axes results in the following hierarchy:

• AnyPath – any path
  • AnyFilePath – any path to a file
    • FilePath – an absolute path to a file
    • RelativeFilePath – a relative path to a file
      • FileName – a relative path to a file, without directory components
  • AnyDirectoryPath – any path to a directory
    • DirectoryPath – an absolute path to a directory
    • RelativeDirectoryPath – a relative path to a directory

⚠️ Pathy has opinions, so it gives shorter names to absolute paths to encourage their use.

The / operator

The / operator is the main reason that Pathy exists. It allows you to combine paths in a safe manner.

It can be used with the following combinations of types:

below / right	RelativeDirectoryPath	RelativeFilePath
(Absolute) DirectoryPath	(Absolute) DirectoryPath	(Absolute) FilePath
RelativeDirectoryPath	RelativeDirectoryPath	RelativeFilePath
AnyDirectoryPath	AnyDirectoryPath	AnyFilePath

Long paths

Pathy is based on .NET 4.6.2, so supports long paths out of the box.

Formatting

Pathy includes support for formatting paths to particular widths. If the requested width is less than the path length, it will be truncated using ellipses. For example:

    var path = FilePath.From(@"C:\path\to\a\file.txt")
    Console.WriteLine($"{path:20}");

The output of this is is C:\path\...\file.txt.

​ ℹ️ This feature is powered by Win32 functions, so matches what you see in explorer.exe.

Comparisons

Only paths of the exact same type should be compared. Pathy does not support comparing a relative path to an absolute one, as in general this doesn't make sense. Unfortunately .NET places GetHashCode & Equals on the root object type, so there's no sane way to prevent you from doing this (just as there’s no way to prevent you from asking 10.Equals("10")). Just don’t.

The one exception to this rule is that FileNames can be compared with RelativeFilePaths.

Sorting

Pathy supports logical sorting. This means that numeric groups in paths are compared by their numeric value and not their ASCII-betical value.

Logical sorting is not the default since its behaviour may change, so it should only be used for display purposes. To use logical sorting, use PathComparer.Logical<T>()

ℹ️ This feature is also powered by Windows, so matches what you see in explorer.exe.

TODO

Relative paths are not normalized, so comparing them can have inconsistent results.