file system path representation

[snippsat]

why is a special function needed to get the "file system path representation" (how the documentation refers to it)? isn't the existing representation good enough? i'd like to see printed out what a representation that is not good enough looks like and what __fspath__() or os.fspath() would return. imagine you were the on implementing this function. what would the code look like?

So still on this wonder about this,did you read PEP 519👀
Short history in Python 3.4 we got pathlib.

>>> from pathlib import Path
>>> 
>>> working_dir = Path.cwd()
>>> working_dir
WindowsPath('C:/code')
>>> type(working_dir)
<class 'pathlib.WindowsPath'> 

So for various there is sometime a need to get string representation,as OS has the C's own decision to represent file system paths as string const char *.
So str() work,but has corner cases that may fail or create a file unwanted.

>>> working_dir
WindowsPath('C:/code')
>>> # Convert to string path
>>> new_path = str(working_dir)
>>> new_path
'C:\\code'
>>> type(new_path)
<class 'str'>

The preferred way is to use __fspath__() or os.fspath(),added in Python 3.6.

>>> working_dir
WindowsPath('C:/code')
>>> # Convert to string path
>>> working_dir.__fspath__()
'C:\\code'

>>> # Or 
>>> import os
>>> 
>>> os.fspath(working_dir)
'C:\\code