hpath-0.7.3: README.md
# HPath
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Support for well-typed paths in Haskell. Also provides ByteString based filepath
manipulation.
## Motivation
The motivation came during development of
[hsfm](https://github.com/hasufell/hsfm)
which has a pretty strict File type, but lacks a strict Path type, e.g.
for user input.
The library that came closest to my needs was
[path](https://github.com/chrisdone/path),
but the API turned out to be oddly complicated for my use case, so I
decided to fork it.
Similarly, [posix-paths](https://github.com/JohnLato/posix-paths)
was exactly what I wanted for the low-level operations, but upstream seems dead,
so it is forked as well and merged into this library.
## Goals
* well-typed paths
* high-level API to file operations like recursive directory copy
* safe filepath manipulation, never using String as filepath, but ByteString
* still allowing sufficient control to interact with the underlying low-level calls
Note: this library was written for __posix__ systems and it will probably not support other systems.
## Differences to 'path'
* doesn't attempt to fake IO-related information into the path, so whether a path points to a file or directory is up to your IO-code to decide...
* trailing path separators will be preserved if they exist, no messing with that
* uses safe ByteString for filepaths under the hood instead of unsafe String
* fixes broken [dirname](https://github.com/chrisdone/path/issues/18)
* renames dirname/filename to basename/dirname to match the POSIX shell functions
* introduces a new `Path Fn` for safe filename guarantees and a `RelC` class
* allows pattern matching via unidirectional PatternSynonym
* uses simple doctest for testing
* allows `~/` as relative path, because on posix level `~` is just a regular filename that does _NOT_ point to `$HOME`
* remove TH, it sucks
## Differences to 'posix-paths'
* uses the `word8` package for save word8 literals instead of `OverloadedStrings`
* `hasTrailingPathSeparator` and `dropTrailingPathSeparator` behave in the same way as their `System.FilePath` counterpart
* added various functions:
* `equalFilePath`
* `getSearchPath`
* `hasParentDir`
* `hiddenFile`
* `isFileName`
* `isValid`
* `makeRelative`
* `makeValid`
* `normalise`
* `splitSearchPath`
* `stripExtension`
* has a custom versions of `openFd` which allows more control over the flags than its unix package counterpart
* adds a `getDirectoryContents'` version that works on Fd
## Examples in ghci
Start ghci via `cabal repl`:
```hs
-- enable OverloadedStrings
:set -XOverloadedStrings
-- import HPath.IO
import HPath.IO
-- parse an absolute path
abspath <- parseAbs "/home"
-- parse a relative path (e.g. user users home directory)
relpath <- parseRel "jule"
-- concatenate paths
let newpath = abspath </> relpath
-- get file type
getFileType newpath
-- return all contents of that directory
getDirsFiles newpath
-- return all contents of the parent directory
getDirsFiles (dirname newpath)
```