Python os.environ["HOME"] works on idle but not in a script

Question

I am working on a simple Python (2.7.3) script, but I have to get the user's Home Folder. I tried:

import os
home_folder = os.environ["HOME"]

And it works fine when I'm running this code on IDLE, but if I launch it from the cmd, it gives me: «KeyError: 'HOME'»

Can someone tell me why? How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

Windows uses USERPROFILE, instead of HOME. Windows doesn't have HOME and other OSs don't have USERPROFILE, so using either of these drops platform independence.

To keep platform independence, you can use expanduser from os.path, like so:

import os.path
home_folder = os.path.expanduser('~')

On a side note, you can use print(os.environ) to see all the environment variables you to have access to, which shows that IDLE has extras.