Dash on Windows crashes with Syntax Error due to forward slash in Windows path

[SunnyBoyVivaldi]

I did a Quick-Fix to solve this issue for myself (see below), but I like to share my findings here and give opportunity to fix this properly.

Describe your context
I run JupyterLab Desktop on Windows 11 (64-bit)

Then I import dash like so:

from dash import Dash
from dash import dcc, html
from dash.dependencies import Input, Output
import plotly.express as px

Output of pip list is:

dash                      2.18.1
dash-core-components      2.0.0
dash-html-components      2.0.0
dash-table                5.0.0

Describe the bug
As soon as I run : app.run_server(mode='inline') an error is thrown with message:

[2024-09-13 15:41:45,496] ERROR in app: Exception on /_alive_0ded12ab-0b05-44c0-a874-6b2a8c7f5800 [GET]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "\?[C:\Users\Gebruiker\AppData\Roaming\jupyterlab-desktop\jlab_server\Lib\site-packages\flask\app.py", line 1473](file:///C:/Users/Gebruiker/AppData/Roaming/jupyterlab-desktop/jlab_server/Lib/site-packages/flask/app.py#line=1472), in wsgi_app
response = self.full_dispatch_request()
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

... ...

File "\?[C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\jupyterlab-desktop\jlab_server\Lib\site-packages\dash\dash.py", line 844](file:///C:/Users/Gebruiker/AppData/Roaming/jupyterlab-desktop/jlab_server/Lib/site-packages/dash/dash.py#line=843), in _relative_url_path
modified = int(os.stat(module_path).st_mtime)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
OSError: [WinError 123] The syntaxis of filename, folder name or volume name is incorrect: '\\?\C:\Users\Gebruiker\AppData\Roaming\jupyterlab-desktop\jlab_server\Lib\site-packages\dash\deps/[email protected]'

And then an Internal Server Error

Expected behavior
At least not an error, I expect a nice chart or so

Quick Fix

As I have a local installation on my Windows PC, I fixed the problem by bluntly replacing the forward slash (/) with an escaped backslash:

in 'dash.py' I added in line 840:
relative_package_path = relative_package_path.replace("/", "\\")

If applicable, add screenshots or screen recording to help explain your problem.