Is it possible to get the path of a tempfile in Python 3

Question

I was wondering if it was possible to get the file path of a temporary file made using the tempfile library. Basically, I'm trying to make a function that intakes some data, and generates a temporary csv file based off of said data. I was wondering if there was a way to get the path of this temporary file?

Answer 1

Use tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile to create a temporary file with a name, and then use the .name attribute of the object.

Note that there are platform-specific limitations on how this name can be used. The documentation says:

Whether the name can be used to open the file a second time, while the named temporary file is still open, varies across platforms (it can be so used on Unix; it cannot on Windows NT or later).

Answer 2

tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile has a .dir property which will give you want you want.

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EDIT: No, it is not .name, @Barmar, but looking through the source code for tempfile, I don't see a .dir property either. However, you can use the .name property in conjunction with os.path's dirname method as follows:

with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix='.csv', prefix=os.path.basename(__file__)) as tf:     tf_directory = os.path.dirname(tf.name) 

Answer 3

Anyway, if you need the path of the tempfile directory you can use tempfile.gettempdir()