NiceIO

This is a fork of Lucas Meijer's NiceIO. 99.9% credit goes to Lucas for this library. I mostly just added nuget injection packaging that maintains his "just copy it into your project" design. -scott

About

For when you've had to use System.IO one time too many.

I need to make c# juggle files & directories around a lot. It has to work on osx, linux and windows. It always hurts, and I've never enjoyed it. NiceIO is an attempt to fix that.

NiceIO is MIT Licensed.

Installation

While you can just copy NiceIO.cs directly into your project and hack at it, NiceIO is best used in its package form: add a project reference to OkTools.NiceIO.

But this is different from a typical Nuget package!! OkTools.NiceIO injects NiceIO.cs directly into your project. There will be no NiceIO.dll. Also, because NPath is partial, you can add whatever you want to it without being limited to extension methods (though those of course are also fine).

You get all the benefits of a version-controlled, upstream-maintained class while still being able to directly extend it.

To get NPath, do the following:

1. Add a reference to OkTools.NiceIO in your project.

2. (Optional) Decide if you want NPath to be public API. By default, it is internal, but if you want your library to publish it or use in other public API, you can set NICEIO_PUBLIC as a DefineConstant in a project PropertyGroup.

3. (Optional) Decide if you want NPath to be in the default NiceIO namespace. You can change it to what you want by setting a PreprocessorValue for NICEIO_NAMESPACE in a project ItemGroup.

4. (Optional) Add members directly to NPath by creating a partial class NPath in your project and adding them there.

Here is an example snippet of a .csproj that exercises the above features:

<PropertyGroup>
  <DefineConstants>$(DefineConstants);NICEIO_PUBLIC</DefineConstants>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
  <PackageReference Include="OkTools.NiceIO" />
  <PreprocessorValue Include="NICEIO_NAMESPACE" Value="My.Lovely.Namespace" Visible="false" />
</ItemGroup>

After a dotnet restore, this project will contain a new public class My.Lovely.Namespace.NPath.

Here's a silly example of extending NPath in that same project:

// MyProject/NiceIO_MoreStuff.cs
namespace My.Lovely.Namespace;
partial class NPath
{
    bool _someField;
    public void DoSomething() => _someField = _path.Length > 10;
}

Real world usage of the above features is demonstrated at another OkTools project at Core.csproj and NiceIO_Ext.cs.

Basic Usage

//paths are immutable
NPath path1 = new NPath(@"/var/folders/something");
// /var/folders/something

//use back,forward,or trailing slashes,  doesnt matter
NPath path2 = new NPath(@"/var\folders/something///");
// /var/folders/something

//semantically the same
path1 == path2;
// true

// ..'s that are not at the beginning of the path get collapsed
new NPath("/mydir/../myfile.exe");
// /myfile.exe

//build paths
path1.Combine("dir1/dir2");
// /var/folders/something/dir1/dir2

//handy accessors
NPath.HomeDirectory;
// /Users/lucas

//all operations return their destination, so they fluently daisychain
NPath myfile = NPath.HomeDirectory.CreateDirectory("mysubdir").CreateFile("myfile.txt");
// /Users/lucas/mysubdir/myfile.txt

//common operations you know and expect
myfile.Exists();
// true

//you will never again have to look up if .Extension includes the dot or not
myfile.ExtensionWithDot;
// ".txt"

//getting parent directory
NPath dir = myfile.Parent;
// /User/lucas/mysubdir

//copying files,
myfile.Copy("myfile2");
// /Users/lucas/mysubdir/myfile2

//into not-yet-existing directories
myfile.Copy("hello/myfile3");
// /Users/lucas/mysubdir/hello/myfile3

//listing files
dir.Files(recurse:true);
// { /Users/lucas/mysubdir/myfile.txt, 
//   /Users/lucas/mysubdir/myfile2, 
//   /Users/lucas/mysubdir/hello/myfile3 }

//or directories
dir.Directories();
// { /Users/lucas/mysubdir/hello }

//or both
dir.Contents(recurse:true);
// { /Users/lucas/mysubdir/myfile.txt, 
//   /Users/lucas/mysubdir/myfile2, 
//   /Users/lucas/mysubdir/hello/myfile3, 
//   /Users/lucas/mysubdir/hello }

//copy entire directory, and listing everything in the copy
myfile.Parent.Copy("anotherdir").Files(recurse:true);
// { /Users/lucas/anotherdir/myfile, 
//   /Users/lucas/anotherdir/myfile.txt, 
//   /Users/lucas/anotherdir/myfile2, 
//   /Users/lucas/anotherdir/hello/myfile3 }

//easy accesors for common operations:
string text = myfile.ReadAllText();
string[] lines = myfile.ReadAllLines();
myFile.WriteAllText("hello");
myFile.WriteAllLines(new[] { "one", "two"});