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I am wondering how I can programmatically add \ in front of spaces that appear in file paths. I am using fs.readdir to get the contents of directories and if I don't escape the spaces out of the path then I get an ENOENT error because unescaped paths are invalid in UNIX. I'd like get below result :

/path/with\ spaces/in/them/

However, I am running into a problem with a REGEX in the NODE REPL. When I do :

var path = '/path/with spaces/in/them/';
var escapedPath = path.replace(/(\s)/, "\\ ");

I get as result :

'/path/with\\ spaces/in/them/'

When I try to run this same code inside of the Chrome console I get :

"/path/with\ spaces/in/them/"

Which is the desired effect.

I am not sure if I am missing something or if this is a bug. I am confused because Node runs on the same Javascript engine as Chrome so I would think that these expressions would be interpreted the same.

Please let me know if anyone knows a way to do get around this. Maybe I am missing something. I just need to be able to escape the paths before passing them into fs.readdir so that I can avoid these errors.

Thanks!

kevin
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  • Sounds like a bug in `fs.readdir` to me. – James M Jul 31 '13 at 15:28
  • Actual results are the same in Chrome and in Node.js. The difference is how they shows it. Try adding `console.log` in `node.js` and you'll see the same result. – Leonid Beschastny Jul 31 '13 at 15:38
  • As for unescaped strings, `fs.readFile` works fine with the output of `fs.readdir`. – Leonid Beschastny Jul 31 '13 at 15:44
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    Thanks Leonid! I was seeing the problem inside of the REPL, but when I created a test file and console logged the `escapedPath` variable it was indeed escaped properly. It turns out that `fs.readdir` **doesn't** require you to escape the paths at all. I actually had another bug in my code that was a little harder to track down. I thought the problem was coming from not escaping the input to `fs.readdir` but that wasn't the problem at all. – kevin Jul 31 '13 at 19:24
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    having same problem with fs.rename() ENOENT. (q-io/fs) bug? – knutole May 01 '14 at 10:44

2 Answers2

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fs.readdir doesn't require you to escape paths. I was able to recursively pass fs.readdir output directories back into fs.readdir without any issues.

The issue above with the REGEX was only occuring in the Node REPL. Once I tested the above code inside of a file I was able to run it through Node and get the same output I saw in the Chrome console.

I ended up finding a bug in my code that was a little hard to track down. I first thought that it came from not escaping the path I was sending into fs.readdir but it was actually an issue where I was fs.stat the output of fs.readdir and then checking if the output was a file or a directory and treating it accordingly.

It turns out that a few results from the stat were neither Files or Directories and my function didn't have any way to deal with this so it just returned. Since I had no handlers for this my node program just stopped abrubtly. All I had to do was add an extra else condition to catch the non-file/directories cases (which I don't care about anyway).

Now its working fine!

kevin
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3

try either this 

var path = "'file:///Users/kevin/folder with space'";

or this

var path = "\"file:///Users/kevin/folder with space\"";
MikeT
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acostil
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