Strip filename from path (but only if the path points to a file)

Question

The issue is actually very easy, but I'm wondering if there is a particular elegant way available to solve it I overlooked.

Consider I get a path (e.g. from the user via console input) that can point to either a directory or a file, e.g. one of the following

/directory1/directory2/file.txt
/directory1/directory2

Now I want to write code that strips away a potential filename from the end of the path, but not a directory name, so that in the example both paths would be reduced to /directory1/directory2.

• I considered os.path.dirname, but that always strips away the last path component, even if it is a directory
• The obvious solution is to use os.path.isdir or os.path.isfile and strip conditionally
• What I'm wondering: Is there an even shorter version available, something like os.path.closest_dirname?
  What probably bugs me a bit here is that os.path.dirname does not return the closest directory but instead will always return the parent directory (i.e. works more like os.path.parentdir)

Answer 1

This should work on a minimal Python distribution:

import os

def filefn(absfn):
  return absfn.split(os.path.sep)[-1]

Answer 2

I would use parts rather than parents:

from pathlib import Path

def foo(path):
    p = Path(path)
    return p.parts[-1]    # returns last part of path which is stripped filename

Answer 3

There's nothing in os.path that seems to do what you're looking for directly.

I don't see anything much wrong with the following though:

print(path if os.path.isdir(path) else os.path.dirname(path))