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File Locations and Paths

Reading and Writing Files in Python Darren Jones 05:05

When you access a file on an operating system, a file path is required. The file path is a string that represents the location of a file. It’s broken up into three major parts:

Folder Path: the file folder location on the file system where subsequent folders are separated by a forward slash / (Unix) or backslash \ (Windows)
File Name: the actual name of the file
Extension: the end of the file path pre-pended with a period (.) used to indicate the file type

00:00 File locations and paths.

00:05 So far, we’ve only been working with files which are in the same location as our script, but generally we would want to do something more complicated than that. Files can be located with file paths, a string that represents the location of a file.

00:19 They can be broken up into three major parts: the path where the file is located, which we’ll be looking at in the next section; the filename, the name of the file in question; and the extension. A path gives the location on the file system where a file is located, and they can be relative or absolute.

00:45 Relative paths on Windows. So, relative paths start in the current directory and start with either a directory or a filename. The first one is simple, just a filename, my_file.py.

00:57 The second one is a folder, or directory, data\, with info.txt in. The third one follows a similar pattern, but with directories of config\users\darren\ and then settings.json being the file.

01:10 The fourth one has the double dot character (..), which takes you up a level, then you descend into \peer\folder\data\ to find config.txt. Note that the path is separated with the backslash character. This applies only to Windows.

01:26 Relative paths on other OSes follow the same pattern, with one exception. The path is separated with a forward slash character rather than backslash. This is something that we need to deal with. Fortunately, Python gives us a solution. We’ll look at the module that allows us to do this after we’ve seen what absolute paths look like.

01:47 Absolute paths give the full explicit location of a file or folder, a bit like the difference between saying “John lives up the road from me,” or giving his full address. On Windows, a full path will begin with a drive letter, such as C. On macOS and Linux, a full path will consist of only folder names, as they do not have drive letters.

02:12 To deal with these different separators, the os module provides a solution. os.path.join() creates paths that are appropriate for the OS that you’re running on. Here you can see some code where the os module is imported and then folder_path is created using os.path.join() with the values of "Users", "Fred", and "Downloads". Finally, the folder_path is printed, and as you can see below, there’s a different result on Windows than macOS.