boost filesystem canonical path is not valid after conversion to const char *
boost-filesystem, c++
Solution
Despite not being standard practice, forward slashes are also accepted on Windows, that's why boost isn't forcing the conversion.
However, some libraries won't accept forward slashes. `boost::filesystem::path::make_preferred()`[1] is meant to solve such situations, by converting the path to the system's preferred representation (i.e. using backslashes on Windows).
[1] This older reference makes that behaviour more obvious
As discused below, while (most of) the Windows API accepts forward slashes, and even a mixture of forward and backslashes, some user interfaces even on applications included in Windows don't.
Problem
I am trying to transform a relative path and convert it to absolute to pass to SQLite using boost filesystem. This is supposed to work correctly for windows and linux ``` boost::filesystem::path path("../../data/dominion"); boost::filesystem::path file("dominion.db"); boost::filesystem::path canonical = boost::filesystem::canonical(dataPath / file); ``` canonical returns ``` m_pathname=L"D:/Users\\me\\Documents\\tonkatsu\\data\\dominion\\dominion.db" ``` As you can see the beginning of the path "D:/" is not correct. I also tried to call normalize() on it without success Is there a way to remedy to this ?