Splits a file or directory name into its constituent parts.
Y is a character vector or scalar containing a single name, or a vector of character vectors containing zero or more names. Names must conform to the file-naming rules of the host Operating System.
The file(s) need not exist; indeed this system function makes no attempt to identify or locate it/them.
The optional left-argument X specifies whether or not the name or names specified by Y are normalised before being processed. The default value 0 means no normalisation; 1 means normalise as follows:
- Pathnames are made absolute.
- On Windows, all "\" directory separators are changed to "/".
- The resultant name is simplified by removing extraneous directory separators etc. On Windows, this includes resolving occurrences of "." and ".." within the name. On non-Windows platforms single "." are removed. Note that ".." and symbolic links interact differently on Windows to other platforms; on other platforms they cannot be removed without reference to the file system itself and are left in place.
If Y is a scalar or vector, the result R is a 3-element vector of character vectors as follows:
| [1] | path |
| [2] | base name |
| [3] | extension |
The path identifies the directory in which the file exists.
The base name is the name of the file stripped of its path and extension, if any.
The extension is the file extension including the leading ".".
If Y is a vector of character vectors, R is a vector of 3-element character vectors and is the same length as Y.
Examples
⎕CMD 'CD'⍝ Current working directory
c:\Users\Pete
1 ⎕NPARTS 'α'
┌→─────────────────────────┐
│ ┌→─────────────┐ ┌→┐ ┌⊖┐ │
│ │c:/Users/Pete/│ │α│ │ │ │
│ └──────────────┘ └─┘ └─┘ │
└∊─────────────────────────┘
1 ⎕NPARTS '\Users\Pete\Documents\dyalog.zip'
┌→───────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ┌→───────────────────────┐ ┌→─────┐ ┌→───┐ │
│ │C:/Users/Pete/Documents/│ │dyalog│ │.zip│ │
│ └────────────────────────┘ └──────┘ └────┘ │
└∊───────────────────────────────────────────┘
⊃'.'⎕wg'APLVersion'
AIX-64
1 ⎕nparts'/home/andys/./..'
┌────────────┬──┬┐
│/home/andys/│..││
└────────────┴──┴┘
1 ⎕NPARTS '.' '..'
┌────────────────┬───────┐
│┌───┬─────────┬┐│┌───┬┬┐│
││i:/│Documents││││i:/││││
│└───┴─────────┴┘│└───┴┴┘│
└────────────────┴───────┘