Rust by Example

41 Path

The Path struct represents file paths in the underlying filesystem. There are two flavors of Path: posix::Path, for UNIX-like systems, and windows::Path, for Windows. The prelude exports the appropriate platform-specific Path variant.

A Path can be created from almost any type that implements the BytesContainer trait, like a string, and provides several methods to get information from the file/directory the path points to.

Note that a Path is not internally represented as an UTF-8 string, but instead is stored as a vector of bytes (Vec<u8>). Therefore, converting a Path to a &str is not free and may fail (an Option is returned).

#![feature(path)] #![feature(io)] use std::old_io::fs::PathExtensions; fn main() { // Create a `Path` from an `&'static str` let path = Path::new("."); // The `display` method returns a `Show`able structure let display = path.display(); // Check if the path exists if path.exists() { println!("{} exists", display); } // Check if the path is a file if path.is_file() { println!("{} is a file", display); } // Check if the path is a directory if path.is_dir() { println!("{} is a directory", display); } // `stat` returns an IoResult<FileStat> === Result<FileStat, IoError> let stat = match path.stat() { Err(why) => panic!("{}", why.desc), Ok(stat) => stat, }; println!("{} size is {} bytes", display, stat.size); // `join` merges a path with a byte container using the OS specific // separator, and returns the new path let new_path = path.join("a").join("b"); // Convert the path into a string slice match new_path.as_str() { None => panic!("new path is not a valid UTF-8 sequence"), Some(s) => println!("new path is {}", s), } }

Be sure to check at other Path methods (posix::Path or windows::Path) and the FileStat struct.