Various frameworks and platforms are available for developers to utilise to ensure the applications they create for the clients are smooth and fast. Node.js is a very popular framework among these developers. Node js is a runtime environment that is executed on the Chrome V8 engine. This library is known to execute JavaScript code out of the constraints of the web browser. It is an open-source, cross-platform, back-end environment that lets developers produce dynamic content for web pages. It uses an event-driven and non-blocking I/O model which makes it lightweight and efficient. It can also run on various platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac Os, etc. There are many inbuilt modules in Node.js that make it popular and the Node.js path is one of them. 

What is the Path module?

There are many modules that Node provides but the path module is one of the more useful ones that is often forgotten or ignored. This module has many methods and the primary function for most of these is to easily interact with and manipulate file paths by helping developers with pathnames of files and directories on the system. 

Some Path methods and their uses

• Path.join()-

In Node.js Path, join() is the most commonly used method by developers. It is used to join various parts of a file path into a string. If the application needs this file path anywhere else, this string can be used. Apart from joining many path segments, it does so by using as a delimiter, a separator that is specific to the platform. Delimiters for different operating systems like windows and MAC are different.

With a platform-specific separator, the program doesn’t break when the path is explicitly stated on different OSs. It also normalises the resulting path and returns it. It returns a string and if the string of the joined path is zero-length, ‘.’ is returned. You can also figure out the difference between low code vs no node to get the best way forward for you.

• path.basename()-

Another commonly used method, invoking it will return the directory referring to the file or the name of the file or returns the later portion of any specific path, much like the Unix command of the same name. This function treats these names in a case-sensitive manner even though Windows does not. Extensions like HTML are included in this method but developers can remove them through path.basename as well. 

• Path.isAbsolute()-

An extremely useful method in Node.js Path, it is used to check if any specified path in the argument is an absolute path. An absolute path is when it contains all the necessary details required to locate any file. A string path is passed as an argument and a boolean (true or false) is returned. When the path is a zero-length string, the return is false. 

• Path.delimiter()-

Another in-built programming interface, this method is used to find the delimiter according to the platform. The return comes in the form of a string that provides the platform-specific delimiter required. The return for windows is “;” and for POSIX is “:” 

Many such methods are available and are useful to developers. 

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