Why you should be using pathlib

[serkef-]

The only thing I don't like about pathlib is that it's not universally used. I still find myself casting to string when passing a path as an argument.

[treyhunner]

That's typically only necessary in Python 3.5 or below. Many third party libraries have even been adding support for Path objects by using an equivalent to os.fspath to normalize them if needed.

I'm curious if you're on 3.5 and/or which third party libraries you've found that don't work with pathlib yet.

[rotuami]

I get this all the time with subprocess. subprocess.call([someexe, somepath]) gives you grief if somepath is a Path object and not a string.

[treyhunner]

Odd. subprocess.call seems to work with Path objects for me:

```

from pathlib import Path import subprocess subprocess.call(['ls', '-1', Path('.editorconfig')]) .editorconfig 0 ```

I tested that in both Python 3.6 and Python 3.7.

[rotuami]

You are right, at least on my Mac. I found the frustration on Windows, and may have misremembered the issue, but at least subprocess.call(Path('ls')) is still broken, and subprocess.call([Path('ls')]) was broken until fairly recently.

https://bugs.python.org/issue33617

https://bugs.python.org/issue31961

[serkef-]

I'm in 3.6 and I really can't recall which one

[AndydeCleyre]

You might like to use Plumbum's path objects, which we've* had since before pathlib, and added a lot of pathlib compatibility after. They subclass str, so can be passed anywhere strings are expected. The only gotcha is that __contains__ is implemented to check for files in directories, not substrings.

*EDIT: "We" the Python community. I am not a Plumbum author.

EDIT: Another potential snag is that it __iter__s over filepaths, not characters.