Data set wont load on Windows

[wellscrosby]

On Windows (didn't test Linux) I was getting the error:
Training data file "datasets\mnist\train-images-idx3-ubyte" not found; did you remember to download and extract it?: Os { code: 5, kind: permissiondenied, message: "access is denied." }
from running Mnist::new(r"datasets\mnist");

To get Mnist::new(r"datasets\mnist"); to work I had to move each of the idx3-ubyte files (from their folders with only the idx3-ubyte file inside after being extracted) into datasets\mnist\ and change the filenames const values in lib.rs to the following:

// Filenames
const TRAIN_DATA_FILENAME: &str = "train-images.idx3-ubyte";
const TEST_DATA_FILENAME: &str = "t10k-images.idx3-ubyte";
const TRAIN_LABEL_FILENAME: &str = "train-labels.idx1-ubyte";
const TEST_LABEL_FILENAME: &str = "t10k-labels.idx1-ubyte";

the only difference being a '.' instead of a '-' before 'idx3-ubyte' in each.

I'm not sure if I was doing anything wrong or if there is a better way for solving this. I used the built in file extraction tool in Windows 11 to decompress the .gz file, which might not be behaving how you expect (it created a folder with the name "train-images-idx3-ubyte" that has a file named "train-images.idx3-ubyte" in it from decompressing "train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz").

[busyboredom]

Hmm thanks for reporting this, I'll check it out. I never tested this on windows 11, so could definitely be a quirk with some change in default behavior for windows 11 vs 10. Or it could be a change in the mnist archive upstream.

[busyboredom]

Just tested on NixOS/KDE Plasma, and the files from http://yann.lecun.org/exdb/mnist/index.html are extracted as expected. So this does seem to be a Windows quirk. I'll make a fix this weekend