CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Johan Selin
Johan Selin

Reputation: 3

How to get the same path on different operating systems when reading and writing files in Python?

I'm working on a project with a friend and we use different operating systems (Windows / MACOS) which we believe to be the root of this problem. The problem being that when reading a file we have different working directories, mine being one step deeper in the hierarchy.

My path: C:/Code-projects/Python/python-laborations/lab1

Whereas his is: C:/Code-projects/Python/python-laborations (not exactly since he's on Mac but it's beside the point)

We want to access a file in the path C:/Code-projects/Python/python-laborations/data. Later on we want to write to this directory as well.

Now when trying to read a file the following string works for him: 'data/tramstops.json' but I'll get a FileNotFound error. Instead I need to use the path '../data/tramstops.json' and everything works.

Our combined solution for this looks as follows, where path is for example 'data/tramstops.json':

try:
    with open(path, 'r', encoding="utf-8") as file:
        do_something()
except FileNotFoundError:
    with open('../' + path, 'r', encoding="utf-8") as file:
        do_something()

But now we want to write to a file and using this approach will not raise an exception but instead just create the file (in the wrong place). So we need a different solution. One thing we tried was constructing an absolute path with the os module. Pseudo-code as follows:

current_dir = os.getcwd()
split current_dir into list
if "lab1" in list then delete it
add path-argument to current_dir

This solution works but it's not very elegant and we feel there must be a better way. We also want to avoid hard-coding paths into our code since we don't want it to depend on file-structure. Is there a better way?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 963

Answers (1)

synthesizerpatel
synthesizerpatel

Reputation: 28036

os.path

Instead of importing this module directly, import os and refer to
this module as os.path.  The "os.path" name is an alias for this
module on Posix systems; on other systems (e.g. Mac, Windows),
os.path provides the same operations in a manner specific to that
platform, and is an alias to another module (e.g. macpath, ntpath).

Some of this can actually be useful on non-Posix systems too, e.g.
for manipulation of the pathname component of URLs.

Upvotes: 2

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