How do I get a file's parent directory?

Question

Given a path to a file, c:\xxx\abc\xyz\fileName.jpg, how can I get the file's parent folder? In this example, I'm looking for xyz. The number of directories to get to the file may vary.

Answer 1

Using python >= 3.4 pathlib is part of the standard library, you can get the parent name with .parent.name:

from pathlib import Path
print(Path(path).parent.name)

To get all the names use .parents:

print([p.name for p in Path(path).parents])

It can be installed for python2 with pip install pathlib

Answer 2

Use os.path.dirname to get the directory path. If you only want the name of the directory, you can use os.path.basename to extract the base name from it:

>>> path = r'c:\xxx\abc\xyz\fileName.jpg'
>>> import os
>>> os.path.dirname(path)
'c:\\xxx\\abc\\xyz'
>>> os.path.basename(os.path.dirname(path))
'xyz'