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Check that x is a valid path

Source: R/is_path.R
is_path.Rd

Check that x is a valid path, possibly containing a valid filename.

Usage

is_path(x, require_sep = TRUE)

Arguments

x

object to check.

require_sep

should x include a file separator? Ignored if x is "." or "..".

Value

TRUE or FALSE indicating if x is a valid path, possibly containing a valid filename.

Details

is_path() is intended to be used to check for valid paths before creating a directory or a file. Therefore it imposes the following restrictions:

  • x should be a non-empty character string

  • x should end in a slash if it is only a volume name: C:\, not C:.

  • x should not be a relative path of the form D:path or d:path: such paths are not guaranteed to work with functions like file.create(). Use D:./path or d:./path instead.

  • x should not contain the characters ", *, ?, |, <, >, nor any of the control characters ([:cntrl:], with ASCII octal codes 000 through 037 and 177, see help("regex")).

  • x should not contain colons (:) after the first path component (Windows only allows colons to indicate volume names like C:\).

  • path components (i.e., parts separated by file separators / or \\) should not be the Windows-reserved terms CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM<non-zero digit>, LPT<non-zero digit>, case-insensitive variants of these names, or these names followed by an extension.

  • path components should not end with a space

  • path components should not end with a dot, with the exception of "." and ".." that are allowed as first component to indicate the working directory and the parent directory, respectively

  • If x contains a file extension (or compression extension, the current implementation does not distinguish those from each other), the part after the last slash is considered the filename, which should adhere to the restrictions listed above (although it may contain the Windows-reserved terms listed above), and in addition should not contain a colon (:), not start with a space or a hyphen (-), nor end with a slash or backslash.

These restrictions on x consider characters and path components that are not allowed in Windows and thus would lead to an error when used to create a directory or file; characters that are silently removed in Windows and thus would lead to a mismatch between the created directory and the returned path when used to create a directory; and characters that might give problems when used in the shell.

is_path() is lenient with respect to file separators (i.e., / or \\):

  • x does not have to contain any file separator if require_sep is FALSE, such that is_path(x, require_sep = FALSE) can be used to check that filename x only contains allowed characters (given that it ends in a file extension).

  • x might contain trailing file separators if it does not end in a file extension, although these trailing file separators might be ignored or removed in some operations (e.g., they are removed by file.path() and fs::path()).

  • x might contain successive file separators (e.g., // or \\\\): these should be treated by the operating system as if they were only a single file separator.

is_path() does not check that the path in x points to an existing file or folder, nor that such a file or folder can be created.

Notes on paths

The file separator is a backslash (\) on Windows but a forward slash (/) on other operating systems: .Platform$file.sep gives the file separator used on the current platform. Furthermore, the backslash is used as escape character in R, such that backslashes need to be escaped in R code by doubling them. Use cat(x) to omit the escape-characters to see how x would be printed.

Programming notes

The output of tempdir() during R CMD checks on MacOS contains successive forward slashes (e.g., /var/[...]/T//RtmpxC2Fyl/working_dir/RtmpdnqgUR) which in earlier versions of is_path() (then in package progutils) led to spurious warnings about duplicated file separators.

References

See also

fs::path() to construct file paths in a platform-independent way; fs::path_abs() to make paths absolute and normalised; fs::path_math() for even more operations on paths; fs::path_sanitize() to remove invalid characters from potential paths

progutils::create_file_path() to create a file path, creating the directory if it does not yet exist; progutils::create_dir() to create a directory if it does not yet exist

progutils::get_file_path() to check if a file exists and is a unique match to a pattern, and fs::file_exists() and list.files() (which includes directories) to do so without checking they are a unique match to a pattern; utils::file_test() and references there on checking file existence and permissions; file.info() and file.access() to extract information about files or directories

Section 'Paths in the shell' in the vignette Git and GitHub of package checkrpkgs (vignette("git_github", package = "checkrpkgs")) on paths and file separators in the shell.

Other collections of checks on type and length: all_characters(), all_names(), is_logical(), is_natural(), is_number(), is_zerolength()

Examples

is_path(getwd()) # TRUE
#> [1] TRUE
is_path(fs::path_wd("abcd")) # TRUE
#> [1] TRUE
is_path(fs::path_wd("ab|cd")) # FALSE, warning about '|'
#> Warning: 'fs::path_wd("ab|cd")' should not contain '"', '*', '?', '|', '<' or '>':
#> /home/runner/work/checkinput/checkinput/docs/reference/ab|cd
#> [1] FALSE

is_path(fs::path_wd("abcd.txt")) # TRUE
#> [1] TRUE
is_path(fs::path_wd("abcd.txt.gz")) # TRUE
#> [1] TRUE
is_path(fs::path_wd("abcd.gz")) # TRUE
#> [1] TRUE

# ':' is only allowed in the first path component
is_path("D:/") # TRUE
#> [1] TRUE
is_path(fs::path_wd("ab:cd")) # FALSE, warning about ':'
#> Warning: Components 9 of 'fs::path_wd("ab:cd")' should not contain ':':
#> /home/runner/work/checkinput/checkinput/docs/reference/ab:cd
#> [1] FALSE
is_path(fs::path_wd("ab:cd.txt")) # FALSE, warning about ':'
#> Warning: Components 9 of 'fs::path_wd("ab:cd.txt")' should not contain ':':
#> /home/runner/work/checkinput/checkinput/docs/reference/ab:cd.txt
#> Warning: The filename ('ab:cd.txt') in 'fs::path_wd("ab:cd.txt")' should not contain ':':
#> /home/runner/work/checkinput/checkinput/docs/reference/ab:cd.txt
#> [1] FALSE

# Other illegal characters are not allowed in either paths or filenames
is_path(fs::path_wd("ab|cd")) # FALSE, warning about '|'
#> Warning: 'fs::path_wd("ab|cd")' should not contain '"', '*', '?', '|', '<' or '>':
#> /home/runner/work/checkinput/checkinput/docs/reference/ab|cd
#> [1] FALSE
is_path(fs::path_wd("ab|cd.txt")) # FALSE, warning about '|'
#> Warning: 'fs::path_wd("ab|cd.txt")' should not contain '"', '*', '?', '|', '<' or '>':
#> /home/runner/work/checkinput/checkinput/docs/reference/ab|cd.txt
#> [1] FALSE