What is the purpose of 'ParquetFile.sep' attribute?

[yohplala]

Hi,
Currently investigating fastparquet source code, I could notice the undocumented sep attribute in ParquetFile class.

It appears in __init__ function signature, line 96.

    def __init__(self, fn, verify=False, open_with=default_open,
                 root=False, sep=None, fs=None, pandas_nulls=True):

It is recorded line 161
self.sep = sep

It can be displayed through __getstate__ line 162.

    def __getstate__(self):
        return {"fn": self.fn, "open": self.open, "sep": self.sep, "fmd": self.fmd,
                "pandas_nulls": self.pandas_nulls}

But then i don't see it being used elsewhere.
Please, what is its purpose?

Thanks for your feedback,
Have a good day,
Bests

[martindurant]

Probably for creating path names from the relative paths contained in the metadata. However, even Windows works with a separator of "/", and fsspec filesystems all use that, so it probably went defunct. The signature predates fsspec (and you can now explicitly pass a filesystem object).

[yohplala]

Ok, I propose to solve this ticket when corresponding dask ticket is solved.

[martindurant]

The linked issue is closed, but this thread is now very old.

[yohplala]

The linked issue is closed, but this thread is now very old.

Yes, sorry, there has been no follow-up so far.
I propose to close with PR #799: all dask tests are now running.

[martindurant]

Actually, let's just close this. We probably should leave the unused parameter in place for at least another release cycle.