PathWrangler

A simple path library written in Swift.

Installation

Add the following package dependency in your Package.swift:

.package(url: "https://github.com/sersoft-gmbh/path-wrangler.git", from: "2.0.0"),

Or add it via Xcode (as of Xcode 11).

Usage

PathWrangler has two basic representations of a path: AbsolutePath and RelativePath. They have everything you need for simple yet great path computations. A relative path (as the name suggests) is not bound to any root. It’s relative to whatever absolute path you need it to be. Thus it can also be turned into an absolute path using absolute(in:). An absolute path on the other hand is a path that always starts at the root.

Both paths know how to “resolve” (or “simplify”) themselves. By doing so, they try to resolve and thus remove references of the current folder (.) and parent folder (..). Since absolute paths know where to start, they are even able to resolve symlinks. To do so, however, the path must exist on disk. Both path implementations also have a current accessor that returns the current path. For AbsolutePath this is the cwd. For RelativePath this is always just the relative path to the current directory, thus ..

Path components or a relative path can be appended to both paths. There is even a convenience API that allows path building that almost looks like the path representation:

let someSubDir = AbsolutePath.root / "folder1" / "folder2" // -> "/folder1/folder2"

A protocol named PathComponentConvertible is used to represent path components. A bunch of default conformances (like for String, Int, etc.) make working with it easy. But adding more conformances is also easy. Just implement the only requirement pathComponent and return the path component of the conforming type. As of then, the type can be used wherever path components are used in PathWrangler (like with the nice / API mentioned before).

The PathWrangler package contains two products:

• One is CorePathWrangler which contains all the underlying logic but has no dependency on Foundation whatsoever. It uses a few system APIs (like getcwd for determining the current working directory), but is otherwise mainly implemented in pure Swift using only stdlib types. It also depends on Swift Algorithms.
• The other one is PathWrangler which adds a few neat APIs to Foundation types like FileManager or URL that make interacting with AbsolutePath and RelativePath easier.

Documentation

The API is documented using header doc. If you prefer to view the documentation as a webpage, there is an online version available for you:

• CorePathWrangler
• PathWrangler

Contributing

If you find a bug / like to see a new feature in PathWrangler there are a few ways of helping out:

• If you can fix the bug / implement the feature yourself please do and open a PR.
• If you know how to code (which you probably do), please add a (failing) test and open a PR. We’ll try to get your test green ASAP.
• If you can do neither, then open an issue. While this might be the easiest way, it will likely take the longest for the bug to be fixed / feature to be implemented.

License

See LICENSE file.