How to work with libraries that expect a str or PathLike object?

[cyrillkuettel]

Whenever I work with other libraries that operate on a file inside a filesystem, I always find myself calling path.getsyspath
and passing that into some function of that library.

For example:

from fs.subfs import SubFS

archive_dir: SubFS = self.app.filestorage.makedirs("/parent")
archive_dir.create("archive.zip")

sys_path = archive_dir.getsyspath('archive.zip')
with ZipFile(sys_path, "w", ZIP_DEFLATED) as zip_file:
    for match in archive_dir.glob('**/*.csv'):
        zip_file.write(archive_dir.getsyspath(match.path))

This runs fine. However, if I don't use the getsyspath,

archive = archive_dir.open('archive.zip')
with ZipFile(archive, "w", ZIP_DEFLATED) as zip_file:
    for match in archive_dir.glob('**/*.csv'):
        zip_file.write(archive_dir.getsyspath(match.path))

I get:

TypeError: write() argument must be str, not bytes

I'm very much depending on getsyspath to open files with other libraries. Is there a way to do this without getsyspath?

[dargueta]

In this specific case, you should be using ZipFS instead of accessing the archive.

[cyrillkuettel]

Thanks for the answer. My goal was to create a zip from a directory.
Using ZipFS, this ended up being much more concise:

from fs.copy import copy_dir
from fs.zipfs import ZipFS

archive_dir = self.app.filestorage.makedirs("/parent")
zip_filesystem = ZipFS("archive.zip", write=True)

copy_dir(src_fs=archive_dir, src_path=".", dst_fs=zip_filesystem, dst_path=".")

[lurch]

Is there a way to do this without getsyspath?

IMHO it's always easiest to "stay inside" the PyFilesystem world as much as possible, and only use getsyspath as an "escape hatch" back to native paths when you have to deal with libraries outside of PyFilesystem.

[althonos]

For outside libraries, it's much better if they have a way to work with file-like objects rather with paths - in general, it makes the API less restrictive, and with PyFilesystem in particular it allows to use even virtual file systems and just have to use the open method.