Absolute local paths on Windows not recognized

[Dobatymo]

Sorry if I am using it wrong or it's duplicate report.

Running lychee (lychee-v0.11.1-windows-x86_64) on a local absolute path on Windows gives the following error:

>lychee.exe "C:\asd"
Error: Network error

Caused by:
    0: builder error for url (c:\asd): URL scheme is not allowed
    1: URL scheme is not allowed

Running it from that directory with lychee.exe . works!

[lebensterben]

this indeed is a bug.

Windows path is technically URL and the lychee tries to parse the argument as URL before parse it as a file path. And in the case the drive is mistaken as a scheme.

A simple workaround is to change the said order. But it won't work because someone may name a drive as "http". so "http:\foo.bar\xyz" becomes both a legit Windows file path and a legit URL.

The true solution is:

Totally ban positional arguments. If you want to supply a file path, use --file, if you want to supply a glob, use --glob, etc.

[Dobatymo]

Windows drive names can only be letters a-z, so http:\ would not be a valid Windows path. URLs would have to start with a schema and double slash, which Windows paths don't (ignoring network drives like \\server\path\ for now...

But yeah, I agree that paths/URLs are a mess and it's best to explicitly distinguish them!

[lebensterben]

in my made-up example http:\foo.bar\xyz:

• http is the drive name
• \foo.bar\xyz is an absolute path

URLs would have to start with a schema and double slash

False. It doesn't have to contain double slash. Examples

• mailto:foo@bar.com
• foo:bar

[Dobatymo]

Yes sorry, I was incorrect about the double slashes. However Windows doesn't really have drive names, only drive letters afaik.

[lebensterben]

okay after some research it turns out you're right.

on windows the drive letter must be one of A-Z.

(for example see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/disk-management/change-a-drive-letter)

So we can indeed guess whether a positional argument is a absolute path with drive on Windows.

[mre]

Can we collect a few test cases and the expected outcome here?

[lebensterben]

we really should not abuse positional argument even though we can guess whether it's a file path or a URL.

I think in most cases people invoke lychee against specific files or a glob pattern, so the practical choice is to allow path and glob as the positional argument.

directly providing a URL to lychee is a niche case actually. it should either be done with a keyword argument or we simply remove this feature altogether.

[Silvenga]

FWIW, you can workaround this with using drive relative paths - which basically look like standard POSIX paths.

So, assuming the working directory is on the C: drive, you can use /Users/.... Windows is a lot more forgiving with paths than POSIX systems.