Crate camino

UTF-8 encoded paths.

camino is an extension of the std::path module that adds new Utf8PathBuf and Utf8Path types. These are like the standard library’s PathBuf and Path types, except they are guaranteed to only contain UTF-8 encoded data. Therefore, they expose the ability to get their contents as strings, they implement Display, etc.

The std::path types are not guaranteed to be valid UTF-8. This is the right decision for the standard library, since it must be as general as possible. However, on all platforms, non-Unicode paths are vanishingly uncommon for a number of reasons:

• Unicode won. There are still some legacy codebases that store paths in encodings like Shift-JIS, but most have been converted to Unicode at this point.
• Unicode is the common subset of supported paths across Windows and Unix platforms. (On Windows, Rust stores paths as an extension to UTF-8, and converts them to UTF-16 at Win32 API boundaries.)
• There are already many systems, such as Cargo, that only support UTF-8 paths. If your own tool interacts with any such system, you can assume that paths are valid UTF-8 without creating any additional burdens on consumers.
• The “makefile problem” (which also applies to Cargo.toml, and any other metadata file that lists the names of other files) has no general, cross-platform solution in systems that support non-UTF-8 paths. However, restricting paths to UTF-8 eliminates this problem.

Therefore, many programs that want to manipulate paths do assume they contain UTF-8 data, and convert them to strs as necessary. However, because this invariant is not encoded in the Path type, conversions such as path.to_str().unwrap() need to be repeated again and again, creating a frustrating experience.

Instead, camino allows you to check that your paths are UTF-8 once, and then manipulate them as valid UTF-8 from there on, avoiding repeated lossy and confusing conversions.

Structs

• FromPathBufError
  A possible error value while converting a PathBuf to a Utf8PathBuf.
• FromPathError
  A possible error value while converting a Path to a Utf8Path.
• Iter
  An iterator over the Utf8Components of a Utf8Path, as str slices.
• ReadDirUtf8
  Iterator over the entries in a directory.
• Utf8Ancestors
  An iterator over Utf8Path and its ancestors.
• Utf8Components
  An iterator over the Utf8Components of a Utf8Path.
• Utf8DirEntry
  Entries returned by the ReadDirUtf8 iterator.
• Utf8Path
  A slice of a UTF-8 path (akin to str).
• Utf8PathBuf
  An owned, mutable UTF-8 path (akin to String).
• Utf8PrefixComponent
  A structure wrapping a Windows path prefix as well as its unparsed string representation.

Enums

• Utf8Component
  A single component of a path.
• Utf8Prefix
  Windows path prefixes, e.g., C: or \\server\share.