Is lexically_normal() redundant on a call to std::filesystem::canonical() or std::filesystem::weakly_canonical()?

Question

Would there be a reason to call lexically_normal in either of these cases:

std::filesystem::path filepath = someFuntionThatGetsAPath();

filepath = std::filesystem::canonical (filepath).lexically_normal ();
filepath = std::filesystem::weakly_canonical (filepath).lexically_normal ();

I'm seeing this in a code base and I am not sure if it is necessary. I am assuming that canonical and weakly canonical doesn't fail and returns a normalized path already.

Thanks

Answer 1

From the reference for weakly_canonical:

... The resulting path is in normal form.

So there is no point in calling lexically_normal on the return value of this function.

However, for canonical, the resulting path is not necessarily in normal form, and so it makes sense to call lexically_normal on the result.