New in Symfony 5.4 Filesystem Path Class

Contributed by Théo FIDRY in #41954

The Filesystem component is a small utility component that provides functions related to the filesystem which are independent of the underlying operating system. Its scope is small, but it's so convenient that it has more than 200 million downloads.

In Symfony 5.4 we're improving this component by adding a new Path class. This class provides utilities to manipulate file/dir paths in a consistent manner. For example, it includes a canonicalize() method that normalizes slashes, resolves .. segments, etc.

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use  Symfony\Component\Filesystem\Path;

echo Path::canonicalize('../uploads/../config/config.yaml');
// => ../config/config.yaml

PHP provides a dirname() function to get the directory path of a given file path, but it has some quirks. The Path class provides a getDirectory() method as an alternative:

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dirname('C:/Programs');  // returns 'C:', not 'C:/'
dirname('C:/');          // returns '.', not 'C:/'

Path::getDirectory('C:/');            // returns 'C:/'
Path::getDirectory('C:/Programs');    // returns 'C:/'
Path::getDirectory('C:\\');           // returns 'C:/'
Path::getDirectory('C:\\Programs');   // returns 'C:/'

This class includes many other utilities that come in handy in web applications, such as finding the longest common part of some file paths:

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$paths = [
    '/var/www/vhosts/project/httpdocs/config/config.yaml',
    '/var/www/vhosts/project/httpdocs/config/routing.yaml',
    '/var/www/vhosts/project/httpdocs/config/services.yaml',
    '/var/www/vhosts/project/httpdocs/images/banana.gif',
    '/var/www/vhosts/project/httpdocs/uploads/images/nicer-banana.gif',
];

Path::getLongestCommonBasePath($paths);
// return '/var/www/vhosts/project/httpdocs'

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