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I have recently read about dirname and basename. My book uses the following image to explain the difference between them:

enter image description here

I am currently using OSX so my root folder will be /. I wrote the following code in my shell:

path='\\Users\\apple\\Documents\\list.txt'
os.path.dirname(path)

The result that I got was: ''

Then I wrote the following code to check the basename: os.path.basename(path) and the result that I got this time was: '\\Users\\apple\\Documents\\list.txt!

Whats happening over here? How to fix it?

Also, I don't have any text file whose name is list. Shouldn't this cause an error when I was trying to find the dirname and basename of a file that does not exist!?

M.Hamel
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1 Answers1

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OSX, just like Linux, uses / as a separator. You can get the standard separator for your OS from os.path.sep.

>>> import os
>>> os.path.sep
'/'
>>> path='/Users/apple/Documents/list.txt'
>>> os.path.dirname(path)
'/Users/apple/Documents'
>>> os.path.basename(path)
'list.txt'

Notice that os.path is just constructing "correct" paths, it does not do any checking, if files exist. That would not make much sense, if you constructed a path to create a new file. You could use os.path.exists() for that.

Christian König
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    That's an amazing answer! Thank You so much – M.Hamel Aug 10 '17 at 10:54
  • You're welcome. For more information on "file exists", read the answers to [this question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/82831/how-do-i-check-whether-a-file-exists-using-python). – Christian König Aug 10 '17 at 10:58