Michael Hoffman wrote: > John Roth wrote: > >> However, a path as a sequence of characters has even less >> meaning - I can't think of a use, while I have an application >> where traversing a path as a sequence of path elements makes >> perfect sense: I need to descend the directory structure, directory >> by directory, looking for specific files and types. > > > I *have* used a path as a sequence of characters before. I had to deal > with a bunch of filenames that were formatted like "file_02832.a.txt"
Ya, ya , ya, only two days ago I had to lash up a quick script to find all files matching r"\d{8,8}[A-Za-z]{0,3}$" and check that the expected number were present in each sub-directory (don't ask!). BUT you are NOT using "a path as a sequence of characters". Your filename is a path consisting of one element. The *element* is an instance of basestring, to which you can apply all the string methods and the re module. > > I can see the case for a path as a sequence of elements, although in > practice, drive letters, extensions, and alternate streams complicate > things. > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list