# HPath

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Support for well-typed paths in Haskell. Also provides ByteString based filepath
manipulation.

## Motivation

The motivation came during development of
[hsfm](https://github.com/hasufell/hsfm)
which has a pretty strict File type, but lacks a strict Path type, e.g.
for user input.

The library that came closest to my needs was
[path](https://github.com/chrisdone/path),
but the API turned out to be oddly complicated for my use case, so I
decided to fork it.

Similarly, [posix-paths](https://github.com/JohnLato/posix-paths)
was exactly what I wanted for the low-level operations, but upstream seems dead,
so it is forked as well and merged into this library.

## Goals

* well-typed paths
* high-level API to file operations like recursive directory copy
* safe filepath manipulation, never using String as filepath, but ByteString
* still allowing sufficient control to interact with the underlying low-level calls

## Differences to 'path'

* doesn't attempt to fake IO-related information into the path, so whether a path points to a file or directory is up to your IO-code to decide...
* trailing path separators will be preserved if they exist, no messing with that
* uses safe ByteString for filepaths under the hood instead of unsafe String
* fixes broken [dirname](https://github.com/chrisdone/path/issues/18)
* renames dirname/filename to basename/dirname to match the POSIX shell functions
* introduces a new `Path Fn` for safe filename guarantees and a `RelC` class
* allows pattern matching via unidirectional PatternSynonym
* uses simple doctest for testing
* allows `~/` as relative path, because on posix level `~` is just a regular filename that does _NOT_ point to `$HOME`
* remove TH, it sucks

## Differences to 'posix-paths'

* `hasTrailingPathSeparator` behaves in the same way as `System.FilePath`
* `dropTrailingPathSeparator` behaves in the same way as `System.FilePath`
* added various functions like `isValid`, `normalise` and `equalFilePath`
* uses the `word8` package for save word8 literals instead of `OverloadedStrings`
* has custom versions of `openFd` and `getDirectoryContents`