AW: AW: Platform-specific file path delimiters

[Tiemo Hollmann TB]

Hi Mark,
thanks for your advice.
I just don't have an example on hand. Perhaps it only got a wrong habit,
because of some weird experiences in old days.
Tiemo


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: use-livecode [mailto:use-livecode-bounces at lists.runrev.com] Im Auftrag
von Mark Waddingham
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 24. September 2015 13:30
An: How to use LiveCode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>
Betreff: Re: AW: Platform-specific file path delimiters

On 2015-09-24 13:21, Tiemo Hollmann TB wrote:
> Good to know!
> 
> Though I knew, that I could have only used "/" for all platforms, I 
> always put lots of effort in setting platform specific slashes in 
> every case, because of "nicer" error messages for the end user.
> If you are building a path like specialFolderPath("sdat") & slash & 
> myFolder etc. and get back any kind or error like path/file not found, 
> on windows it will look like "C:\ProgramData/myFolder/etc", what 
> puzzled some customers, telling me, that this strange path with slash 
> and backslash can't work (though the reason was other)...

Do you have an example of error messages which are returned with such
'mixed' paths in them?

> I know, that I could have refined the path platform specific only for 
> messaging, but that was too much overhead for me. In future I will 
> only use slash and let the customers be puzzled.

Unfortunately, this is a general issue. Quite often the values you might
need to use internally to actually run code will be different from those
which users might expect. So some 'formatting for display' is always
generally required in user-facing messages.

A similar situation to this is that of locale-specific number formatting
(which, admittedly, LiveCode doesn't currently support).

In the UK, we use '.' as the decimal separator; in many European countries
it is ','. It is easy to see why you need a fixed way to represent numbers
when running them through script - i.e. using '.':
   put item 2 of "1.05,2.05,3.05"

If you used the user-formatted version of numbers you might end up with
trying to do this:
   put item 2 of "1,05,2,05,3,05"

Which would, obviously, give you a completely different result! 
Filepaths are no different to this, and the same runs for dates, currencies,
...

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

--
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps

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