For a "convert files to $format" thing, you'd want to replace the extension. You don't need to specify the previous extension(s) if it's a quick-and-dirty thing where you know everything passed to it will be acceptable; and you don't want to, if you're passing out to some other service which can handle various input formats. (e.g. a wrapper around ffmpeg or ImageMagick or something - they can handle a lot of filetypes with a lot of likely extensions.)
On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 1:43 PM Peter Pentchev <r...@ringlet.net> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 07:00:11AM -0600, Tom Browder wrote: > > Given so many handy methods for built-in classes, it would be nice to > have > > a couple of more for some, for instance: > > > > IO:Path.stemname > > Like basename except any suffix is removed > > Hmm, this sounds like a nice idea on a first glance, but then again, > can you tell me exactly what situations would that be useful for? > Is it for compressed files (e.g. .zip vs .tar.gz) or MS-DOS/Windows > executables (.com, .exe, .bat), or something else? > When I strip filename extensions, I usually know exactly what extensions > I want to strip - e.g. ".conf" or ".pl" or something like that. There > are very, very rare cases when any extension should be stripped - and > there's also a problem with that. > > You see, I was kind of surprised many years ago when I first met > somebody who routinely used a dot as a word separator in filenames - > a file that I would've called "yearly-report.txt" or "YearlyReport.txt", > he would call "yearly.report.txt". Over the years after that, I > stumbled into many other people who do that - not a majority, certainly, > but, well, many people indeed. > > So a function that would remove *any* filename extensions, that is, > anything after and including the first dot, would produce really weird > results if applied to filenames created by such people. > > G'luck, > Peter > > -- > Peter Pentchev r...@ringlet.net r...@freebsd.org p...@storpool.com > PGP key: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/roam.key.asc > Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115 C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13 >
