Working with Filepaths

Jaxer is able to handle both filesystem paths and file:/// urls and provides some convenience methods to resolve provided paths to an actual location on the filesystem.

Let's look at how we would convert from an filesystem path to a URL and vice versa

As you can see, these methods provide a simple way to convert from file system paths to file protocol URL's and vice versa.

Jaxer also provides a way to resolve a relative file path into an absolute path:

Using a combination of these methods will generally allow us to manipulate a provided path or Url to the required path we need.

Creating cross platform filepaths

In JavaScript, to include a backslash in a string, you need to use the escaped notation of '\\' or the character following the backslash is interpreted as an 'escaped' literal. (i.e. 'c:\new folder' appears as if it had a newline between the colon and the 'e').

Jaxer provides a handy tool to deal with this. Use the built in Jaxer.System.separator, which returns the system path separator and is very useful when building paths by concatenation of sub-paths.

This technique for creating paths has the advantage of being cross-platform. For example, in the above snippet, the fact that the path is rooted at 'c:' means that it is actually windows specific.

A cleaner way to do this is provided by the Jaxer.Dir.combine(args) method, which concatenates a list of parts into a full path joined with the platform path separator and cleans any extra path separators contained in the list.