Feature gate: #![feature(normalize_lexically)]

This is a tracking issue for Path::normalize_lexically that is used to normalize a path, including .. parent references, without touching the filesystem.

Public API

// std::path

impl Path {
    pub fn normalize_lexically(&self) -> Result<PathBuf, NormalizeError> {
}

Steps / History

• API Change Proposal
• Implementation: Implement normalize_lexically #134696
• Final comment period (FCP)¹
• Stabilization PR

Unresolved Questions

• Should this take &mut self and normalize in-place? Normalizing a path just removes components.
• Should this disallow resolving to the empty path or the single . path.
• Should this only allow paths without a root or prefix? It may be surprising that base_path.join(user_path.normalize_lexically()?) can still escape the base path.

The last two can be summarised as: should this strictly require paths to be sub-paths?