But maybe you should anyway.

Because maybe you use S3, which treats `foo/bar.txt` and `foo//bar.txt` as entirely separate things. Because to S3, directories don't exist and those are literally the exact names of the keys under which data is stored.

So you have script A concatenate "foo" + "/bar" and script B concatenate "foo/" + "/bar", and suddenly you have a weird problem.

I can't imagine a real use case where you'd think this is desirable.

▲ Mordisquitos 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I can't imagine a real use case where you'd think this is desirable.

Not S3, but here's a literal real use case: the entry for the Iraqw word /ameeni (woman) in Wiktionary.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki//ameeni

If for whatever reason your S3 keys contained English words and their translations separated by a slash, you would have a real problem if one of your scripts were to concatenate woman, / and /ameeni as woman/ameeni instead of woman//ameeni in the English/Iraqw case.

	▲	kstrauser 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you’re working with a use case where that’s even possible, you need to URL-encode it like `woman/%2Fameeni` Consider that if the language allowed trailing slashes. What would this path mean if ameeni/ happened to be a valid word? `ameeni//ameeni` One of those would get the slash but it’s not clear which. W3C says: > The slash ("/", ASCII 2F hex) character is reserved for the delimiting of substrings whose relationship is hierarchical.
	▲	zarzavat 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Sounds like a Unicode problem. U+002F is not a letter codepoint and it's not appropriate to use as a letter given its history of being used for path separation. Iraqw slash should have its own code point. Can they not just use a 3 like in Arabic?

▲ realitylabs 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This exact issue has derailed our main document store for the past several years. We have written a couple supporting applications specifically to address the fallout from this issue.

▲ secondcoming 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If a user of S3 knows that directories aren't real why would they expect directory-related normalisation to happen?