A question about path manipulation

Archive Python API
1

Blender itself seems to do something rather helpful/clever when a file using absolute paths from Windows (e.g. d:\blender\myfolder\myimage.png) is loaded on Linux. It goes looking in /d/blender/myfolder/myimage.png. This makes things nicely predictable.

I ran into an issue with DECALmachine where it stores a path as-is in the blender preferences, and then uses that value as-is whereever those preferences are loaded. On Linux, this means that it ends up creating ‘d:\blender\assets’ as the base folder name, rather than looking for /d/blender/assets. I was trying to find out how/where blender adjusts its path as described at the beginning, in order to provide a way to mirror this helpful blender behavior within the addon.

Is this done within core blender code, or via the Python API?

3

You can easily convert it on loading time through an handler.

This is an example of python functions for converting path linux/windows: path script

And then, on loading the file on another platform (example I use for VSE):

@persistent
def load_post_handler(dummy):
    for scene in bpy.data.scenes:
        if not scene.sequence_editor:
            continue
        sequences = scene.sequence_editor.sequences_all
        for strip in sequences:
            # Adapt path for linux or windows
            match strip.type:
                case 'MOVIE':
                    strip.filepath = convert_os_path(strip.filepath)
                case 'IMAGE':
                    strip.directory = convert_os_path(strip.directory)

bpy.app.handlers.load_post.append(load_post_handler)