PYTHON
Python And File Paths
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Overview
The pathlib Module
The pathlib
module was introduced in Python v3.4 (PEP 428). It’s purpose was to replace the much used functions such as os.path.join()
and family with a simpler set of path manipulating classes/functions which work similarly across all platforms. In the words of PEP 428
, it is “object-orientated file-system paths”.
On Linux/macOS:
file_path = Path('~/my_file.txt')
On Windows you would also use forward slashes to describe paths! The Path
module recognizes you are running the code on Windows and converts the path accordingly.
file_path = Path('C:/Users/my_file.txt')
os.path.join()
has long been the mainstay of concatenating paths in cross-platform way. For instance, os.path.join('my_dir', 'my_file')
would result in the string my_dir/my_file
in Linux-like (POSIX) systems, and my_dir\my_file
on Windows systems. The pathlib
module aims to make os.path.join()
redundant by overloading the /
(slash) operator to allow the concatenation of path segments:
file_path = Path('my_dir') / 'my_file'
Once you have a Path
object, you can check if something exists at that path (typically it would point to a directory or file) by calling .exists()
:
my_path = Path('my_file.txt')
my_path.exists()
# Returns True if text file exists
Getting Parts Of The Path
The Path
object provides many properties to extract different parts of a path:
my_path = Path('/my_dir/my_file.txt')
print(my_path.parent) # '/my_dir'
print(my_path.name) # 'my_file.txt'
print(my_path.stem) # 'my_file'
print(my_path.suffix) # '.txt'
print(my_path.root) # '/'
print(my_path.parts) # ('/', 'my_dir', 'my_file.txt')
Note that in Linux systems, .root
is typically /
, while in Windows system, .root
is typically \\
.
.stem
allows you to extract the filename without the extension, which replaces os.path.splitext()[0]
Backwards Compatibility
If you start using Path
objects in your code but have to interacts with pre-existing code which uses plain strings
for paths, you will have to convert the Path
object to a string first, which is easily done with the str()
cast:
my_path = Path('my_file.txt')
old_function(str(my_path))
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