What's a "canonical path"?

107

The whole point of making anything "canonical" is so that you can compare two things. For example, both ../../here/bar/x and ./test/../../bar/x may refer to the same location, but you can't do a textual comparison on the two paths. However, if you turn them into their canonical representation, they both become ../bar/x, and we see that they actually refer to the same thing.

In short, it is often the case that you have many ways of referring to one thing, and in that case you may be able to define a canonical representation which is unique and which allows you to get a handle on collections of such things.

Source: stackoverflow.com

Similar codes

1 vote138 views1 answer
How to deselect radio button in java
Java
2 votes139 views1 answer
Hibernate select count
Java
4 votes128 views5 answers
Java while
Java
0 vote154 views1 answer
Blurview android github
Java
0 vote130 views1 answer
Specified for property 'mainMergedManifest' does not exist.
Java
3 votes141 views2 answers
Change size of array java
Java
0 vote126 views1 answer
Set text from strings.xml
Java
0 vote138 views1 answer
Read properties file outside jar java
Java
0 vote141 views1 answer
Intelij show method information
Java
0 vote138 views1 answer
Android set socket timeout
Java