The mailbox library, in particular the Mailbox class I'm using, does not support the new Path object requiring a clumsy `mbx = Maildir(str(some_path_obj))` to use with a Path instance.

It currently blows up if passed a Path directly (does not support startswith) - perhaps a simple solution is to coerce whatever is passed into a string inside `__init__`?

Could this support be added?

I feel that strings representing paths should be discouraged as a general principal now we have a truly portable object to represent paths, and supporting Path in all places it makes logical sense (without breaking backwards compatibility, if implemented as I suggest with coercion by `str(...)` inside the module) in the core library seems like a good thing to me.

Sorry, should read "in particular the Maildir class I'm using"...

Same applies to mbox, however.

Hi Laurence, Maildir predates pathlib so it's not surprising it hasn't been updated yet. Could you open a PR to add this?

BTW, you should use os.fspath() instead of str() here.

Hi Rémi,

I understand why it is the case, I just thought it would be a nice enhancement and quick win to add the support.

RE "you should use os.fspath() instead of str()": I'm following in the pathlib docuementation (https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html):

> The string representation of a path is the raw filesystem path itself (in native form, e.g. with backslashes under Windows), which you can pass to any function taking a file path as a string:
> >>>
> >>> p = PurePath('/etc')
> >>> str(p)
> '/etc'
> >>> p = PureWindowsPath('c:/Program Files')
> >>> str(p)
> 'c:\\Program Files'

Is the pathlib documentation wrong/out-of-date?  I Googled your suggestion of `os.fspath` and found <https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0519/> which reads like the pathlib docs need correcting?

I'm trying to setup a build environment to create a PR for this issue as I type...

Thanks,

Laurence

I have patched the module to accept a path-like object, however it still follows the pre-pathlib ways of doing things elsewhere.  There's quite a bit of work to do to modernise the whole module, but this patch at least adds support to pass a Path to the classes it provides so external code can use pathlib and interface with it.

The problem with using `str()` on a path argument is that the argument may not be a str, nor a pathlib object, but `str()` will still create a string out of it, leading to difficult bugs.

The documentation for pathlib also predates the addition of `os.fspath()`.