Consider using the camino crate for UTF-8 paths #5

New issue

Open

opened 2025-10-03 22:55:11 +02:00 by federico · 1 comment

federico commented

2025-10-03 22:55:11 +02:00

Collaborator

Rust's standard library represents file paths as PathBuf which Deref to Path. Individual path components are returned as OsStr slices. Neither of those types can be assumed to be a UTF-8 &str, and as you doubtless have found, this is a pain in the ass for code which is not a file manager which must be able to operate on inconsistently-encoded directory trees.

I think we can safely assume that Fipamo's directory trees will have only valid UTF-8 filenames. If that is the case, the camino crate makes it a lot easier to deal with UTF-8 filenames, since everything there is a &str.

Rust's standard library represents file paths as [`PathBuf`](https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/path/struct.PathBuf.html) which `Deref` to [`Path`](https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/path/struct.Path.html). Individual path components are returned as [`OsStr`](https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ffi/struct.OsStr.html) slices. Neither of those types can be assumed to be a UTF-8 `&str`, and as you doubtless have found, this is a pain in the ass for code which is not a file manager which must be able to operate on inconsistently-encoded directory trees. I think we can safely assume that Fipamo's directory trees will have only valid UTF-8 filenames. If that is the case, the [`camino`](https://lib.rs/crates/camino) crate makes it a lot easier to deal with UTF-8 filenames, since everything there is a `&str`.