What is the correct way in python to annotate a path with type hints?

Question:

What is the proper way to annotate this simple utility function in python3 that reads from a file?
It should accept pathlib.Path objects as well as any other common way of passing a path.

def read_json(path: <TYPE HINT>):
    with open(path, 'rb') as f:
        data = json.load(f)
    return data

It seems to me as if this topic is in flux and I couldn’t find a good place where this information was collected. I am interested in how to handle this in python 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8.

Asked By: Zacharias030

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Answers:

I assume that typical path objects are either Paths or strs, as such you could use a Union:

import pathlib
import typing

typing.Union[str, os.PathLike]
Answered By: Christian Sauer