Escape spaces in File Path

Question

I am wondering how I can programmatically add \ in front of spaces that appear in file paths. I am using fs.readdir to get the contents of directories and if I don't escape the spaces out of the path then I get an ENOENT error because unescaped paths are invalid in UNIX. I'd like get below result :

/path/with\ spaces/in/them/

However, I am running into a problem with a REGEX in the NODE REPL. When I do :

var path = '/path/with spaces/in/them/';
var escapedPath = path.replace(/(\s)/, "\\ ");

I get as result :

'/path/with\\ spaces/in/them/'

When I try to run this same code inside of the Chrome console I get :

"/path/with\ spaces/in/them/"

Which is the desired effect.

I am not sure if I am missing something or if this is a bug. I am confused because Node runs on the same Javascript engine as Chrome so I would think that these expressions would be interpreted the same.

Please let me know if anyone knows a way to do get around this. Maybe I am missing something. I just need to be able to escape the paths before passing them into fs.readdir so that I can avoid these errors.

Thanks!

Answer 1

fs.readdir doesn't require you to escape paths. I was able to recursively pass fs.readdir output directories back into fs.readdir without any issues.

The issue above with the REGEX was only occuring in the Node REPL. Once I tested the above code inside of a file I was able to run it through Node and get the same output I saw in the Chrome console.

I ended up finding a bug in my code that was a little hard to track down. I first thought that it came from not escaping the path I was sending into fs.readdir but it was actually an issue where I was fs.stat the output of fs.readdir and then checking if the output was a file or a directory and treating it accordingly.

It turns out that a few results from the stat were neither Files or Directories and my function didn't have any way to deal with this so it just returned. Since I had no handlers for this my node program just stopped abrubtly. All I had to do was add an extra else condition to catch the non-file/directories cases (which I don't care about anyway).

Now its working fine!