What Is _Path_ Useful For

What is __path__ useful for?

This is usually used with pkgutil to let a package be laid out across the disk. E.g., zope.interface and zope.schema are separate distributions (zope is a "namespace package"). You might have zope.interface installed in /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/zope/interface/, while you are using zope.schema more locally in /home/me/src/myproject/lib/python2.6/site-packages/zope/schema.

If you put pkgutil.extend_path(__path__, __name__) in /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/zope/__init__.py then both zope.interface and zope.schema will be importable because pkgutil will have change __path__ to ['/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/zope', '/home/me/src/myproject/lib/python2.6/site-packages/zope'].

pkg_resources.declare_namespace (part of Setuptools) is like pkgutil.extend_path but is more aware of zips on the path.

Manually changing __path__ is uncommon and probably not necessary, though it is useful to look at the variable when debugging import problems with namespace packages.

You can also use __path__ for monkeypatching, e.g., I have monkeypatched distutils at times by creating a file distutils/__init__.py that is early on sys.path:

import os
stdlib_dir = os.path.dirname(os.__file__)
real_distutils_path = os.path.join(stdlib_dir, 'distutils')
__path__.append(real_distutils_path)
execfile(os.path.join(real_distutils_path, '__init__.py'))
# and then apply some monkeypatching here...

What does ./ (dot slash) refer to in terms of an HTML file path location?

./ is the the folder that the working file is in:

So in /index.htm ./ is the root directory

but in /css/style.css ./ is the css folder.

This is important to remember because if you move CSS from /index.htm to /css/style.css the path will change.

Different paths used for #include and other files

It is so because (as explained here ) the compiler will search for #included files with quotes (not with brackets) with the current working directory being the location of the source file.

Then, when you try to open your .csv file, it's now your program that looks for a file. But your program runs with the current working directory being myproject/ which explains why you must specify data/file.csv as your file path, and not ../data/file.csv. Your program does not run in your src folder, it will run in the directory the binary ends up being invoked from.

You could have noticed that in your Makefile, your -I options specify a different path for your header file than your .cpp file.

EDIT Answer: It's quite simple actually and completely normal. When you invoke your binary, the directory which you're in is the current working directory. That is, if you run it with the command ./myproject/bin/eval.out, the current working directory is . (e.g. /home/the_user/cpp_projects). My post was a bit misleading about that, I corrected it.

Note: You can use the command pwd in a command prompt to know which is the current working directory of this prompt (pwd stands for "print working directory").

How should I write a Windows path in a Python string literal?

you can use always:

'C:/mydir'

this works both in linux and windows.
Other posibility is

'C:\\mydir'

if you have problems with some names you can also try raw string literals:

r'C:\mydir'

however best practice is to use the os.path module functions that always select the correct configuration for your OS:

os.path.join(mydir, myfile)

From python 3.4 you can also use the pathlib module. This is equivelent to the above:

pathlib.Path(mydir, myfile)

or

pathlib.Path(mydir) / myfile

What does \\?\ mean when prepended to a file path

A long read, but worth reading if you are in this domain: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365247%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Extract:

The Windows API has many functions that also have Unicode versions to
permit an extended-length path for a maximum total path length of
32,767 characters. This type of path is composed of components
separated by backslashes, each up to the value returned in the
lpMaximumComponentLength parameter of the GetVolumeInformation
function (this value is commonly 255 characters). To specify an
extended-length path, use the "\\?\" prefix. For example,
"\\?\D:\very long path".

and:

The "\\?\" prefix can also be used with paths constructed according to
the universal naming convention (UNC). To specify such a path using
UNC, use the "\\?\UNC\" prefix. For example, "\\?\UNC\server\share",
where "server" is the name of the computer and "share" is the name of
the shared folder. These prefixes are not used as part of the path
itself. They indicate that the path should be passed to the system
with minimal modification, which means that you cannot use forward
slashes to represent path separators, or a period to represent the
current directory, or double dots to represent the parent directory.
Because you cannot use the "\\?\" prefix with a relative path,
relative paths are always limited to a total of MAX_PATH characters.

Expand Python Search Path to Other Source

There are a few possible ways to do this:

• Set the environment variable PYTHONPATH to a colon-separated list of directories to search for imported modules.
• In your program, use sys.path.append('/path/to/search') to add the names of directories you want Python to search for imported modules. sys.path is just the list of directories Python searches every time it gets asked to import a module, and you can alter it as needed (although I wouldn't recommend removing any of the standard directories!). Any directories you put in the environment variable PYTHONPATH will be inserted into sys.path when Python starts up.
• Use site.addsitedir to add a directory to sys.path. The difference between this and just plain appending is that when you use addsitedir, it also looks for .pth files within that directory and uses them to possibly add additional directories to sys.path based on the contents of the files. See the documentation for more detail.

Which one of these you want to use depends on your situation. Remember that when you distribute your project to other users, they typically install it in such a manner that the Python code files will be automatically detected by Python's importer (i.e. packages are usually installed in the site-packages directory), so if you mess with sys.path in your code, that may be unnecessary and might even have adverse effects when that code runs on another computer. For development, I would venture a guess that setting PYTHONPATH is usually the best way to go.

However, when you're using something that just runs on your own computer (or when you have nonstandard setups, e.g. sometimes in web app frameworks), it's not entirely uncommon to do something like

import sys
from os.path import dirname
sys.path.append(dirname(__file__))

How to get an absolute file path in Python

>>> import os
>>> os.path.abspath("mydir/myfile.txt")
'C:/example/cwd/mydir/myfile.txt'

Also works if it is already an absolute path:

>>> import os
>>> os.path.abspath("C:/example/cwd/mydir/myfile.txt")
'C:/example/cwd/mydir/myfile.txt'

Extract file name from path, no matter what the os/path format

Using os.path.split or os.path.basename as others suggest won't work in all cases: if you're running the script on Linux and attempt to process a classic windows-style path, it will fail.

Windows paths can use either backslash or forward slash as path separator. Therefore, the ntpath module (which is equivalent to os.path when running on windows) will work for all⁽¹⁾ paths on all platforms.

import ntpath
ntpath.basename("a/b/c")

Of course, if the file ends with a slash, the basename will be empty, so make your own function to deal with it:

def path_leaf(path):
    head, tail = ntpath.split(path)
    return tail or ntpath.basename(head)

Verification:

>>> paths = ['a/b/c/', 'a/b/c', '\\a\\b\\c', '\\a\\b\\c\\', 'a\\b\\c', 
...     'a/b/../../a/b/c/', 'a/b/../../a/b/c']
>>> [path_leaf(path) for path in paths]
['c', 'c', 'c', 'c', 'c', 'c', 'c']

^{(1) There's one caveat: Linux filenames may contain backslashes. So on linux, r'a/b\c' always refers to the file b\c in the a folder, while on Windows, it always refers to the c file in the b subfolder of the a folder. So when both forward and backward slashes are used in a path, you need to know the associated platform to be able to interpret it correctly. In practice it's usually safe to assume it's a windows path since backslashes are seldom used in Linux filenames, but keep this in mind when you code so you don't create accidental security holes.}

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