Why opendal choose to trim the leading /s.

[RinChanNOWWW]

I'm wondering why opendal choose to normalize the path by tirmming the leading '/'. (What's the purpose?)

If I want to access a absolute path on my own local filesystem (for example: '/home/rinchannow/xxx.parquet'), it means I have to set the operator root to '/'?.

Why not use the absolute path directly?

OpenDAL Source codes:

/// Make sure all operation are constructed by normalized path:
///
/// - Path endswith `/` means it's a dir path.
/// - Otherwise, it's a file path.
///
/// # Normalize Rules
///
/// - All whitespace will be trimmed: ` abc/def ` => `abc/def`
/// - All leading / will be trimmed: `///abc` => `abc`
/// - Internal // will be replaced by /: `abc///def` => `abc/def`
/// - Empty path will be `/`: `` => `/`
pub fn normalize_path(path: &str) -> String {
    // - all whitespace has been trimmed.
    // - all leading `/` has been trimmed.
    let path = path.trim().trim_start_matches('/');

    // Fast line for empty path.
    if path.is_empty() {
        return "/".to_string();
    }

    let has_trailing = path.ends_with('/');

    let mut p = path
        .split('/')
        .filter(|v| !v.is_empty())
        .collect::<Vec<&str>>()
        .join("/");

    // Append trailing back if input path is endswith `/`.
    if has_trailing {
        p.push('/');
    }

    p
}

[Xuanwo]

I'm wondering why opendal choose to normalize the path by tirmming the leading '/'. (What's the purpose?)

The most important thing is security. OpenDAL maintains an idea about root_dir which means all operations input and output will be scoped under root_dir. After settings root_dir to /path/to/dir, OpenDAL ensures that data outside of /path/to/other_dir will not be accessed. (soft link is not supported so far).

And it's also important to write correct and painless code. Users don't need to consider the differences between abs_path and rel_path.

If I want to access a absolute path on my own local filesystem (for example: '/home/rinchannow/xxx.parquet'), it means I have to set the operator root to '/'?.

It depends on your need. If you want OpenDAL to access the whole fs, you can set root_dir to /. Otherwise, you can set it to /home/rinchannow/.