@wed-std/file-url

Universal library for turning file system paths into file:// URLs. It does not depend on other libraries nor nodejs built-ins and works just the same across node and web without any polyfills.

Why

This libary is intended to facilitate a more web friendly (or rather runtime agnostic) alternative way to refer to files via URLs as opposed to node's path module.

And because node's fs APIs accept file:// URLs in place of paths URLs can be used without having to going bath to paths.

Usage

URLs are OS agnostic

Correct file URLs are created for posix & windows paths regardless of host runtime OS.

import { fromPath } from "@wed-std/file-url"

fromPath("/Users/web-std/file-url/Readme.md").href
//> 'file:///Users/web-std/file-url/Readme.md'

fromPath("C:\\web-std\\file-url\\tscofig.json").href
//> "file:///C:/web-std/file-url/tsconfig.json"

fromPath("\\\\192.168.0.1\\share\\path\\file.txt").href
//> "file://192.168.0.1/share/path/file.txt"

Resolve to base URL

You can use standard URLs to do resolution simply by passing a base URL, making it effective alternative to node's path.resolve / path.join.

new URL("baz/asdf", fromPath("/foo/bar/")).href
// file:///foo/bar/baz/asdf

new URL("../beep.txt", fromPath("/foo/bar/")).href
// file:///foo/beep.txt

new URL("/root/foo", fromPath("/foo/bar/")).href
// file:///root/foo

URLs are normalized

Standard URLs are normalized out of the box so you don't really need an equivalent of path.normalize.

fromPath("/foo/bar/baz/asdf/quux/.././file.md").href
// file:///foo/bar/baz/asdf/file.md

new URL("/.././file.md", fromPath("/foo/bar/baz/asdf/quux/"))
// file:///foo/bar/baz/asdf/file.md

Basename are straight forward

URLs do not have equivalent of path.basename but given that they are normalized and use only forward slashes it's pretty straight forward:

fromPath("/foo/bar.html").pathname.split("/").pop()
//> bar.html

Can break free of try/catch

Sometimes surrounding logic with try / catch blocks introduces incidental complexity. Library provides tryFromPath function to keep things simple when it makes nence

import { tryFromPath } from "@wed-std/file-url"

// Unlike `fromPath` invalid paths do not throw just return null.
const url = tryFromPath(foo) || tryFromPath(bar)

Install

npm install @web-std/file-url