133
votes

If I have an opened file, is there an os call to get the complete path as a string?

f = open('/Users/Desktop/febROSTER2012.xls')

From f, how would I get "/Users/Desktop/febROSTER2012.xls" ?

4

4 Answers

172
votes

The key here is the name attribute of the f object representing the opened file. You get it like that:

>>> f = open('/Users/Desktop/febROSTER2012.xls')
>>> f.name
'/Users/Desktop/febROSTER2012.xls'

Does it help?

111
votes

I had the exact same issue. If you are using a relative path os.path.dirname(path) will only return the relative path. os.path.realpath does the trick:

>>> import os
>>> f = open('file.txt')
>>> os.path.realpath(f.name)
16
votes

And if you just want to get the directory name and no need for the filename coming with it, then you can do that in the following conventional way using os Python module.

>>> import os
>>> f = open('/Users/Desktop/febROSTER2012.xls')
>>> os.path.dirname(f.name)
>>> '/Users/Desktop/'

This way you can get hold of the directory structure.

6
votes

You can get it like this also.

filepath = os.path.abspath(f.name)