moving from unipath to pathlib

Unipath is a very nice 3rd-party library for an object-oriented approach to Python file/directory operations. Just look at this sane API:

>>> from unipath import Path
>>> p = Path("/usr/lib/python2.5/gopherlib.py")
>>> p.parent
Path("/usr/lib/python2.5")
>>> p.name
Path("gopherlib.py")
>>> p.ext
'.py'
>>> p.stem
Path('gopherlib')
>>> q = Path(p.parent, p.stem + p.ext)
>>> q
Path('/usr/lib/python2.5/gopherlib.py')
>>> q == p
True

However, a very similar module landed in Python 3 called pathlib. It is almost the same as unipath but since it’s in the standard library, I think I’ll switch to it. It means one less external dependency, which is always a good thing.

Let’s see what it looks like:

>>> from pathlib import Path
>>> p = Path("/usr/lib/python2.5/gopherlib.py")
>>> p.parent
PosixPath('/usr/lib/python2.5')
>>> p.name
'gopherlib.py'
>>> p.suffix    # !!! called suffix, not ext !!!
'.py'
>>> p.stem
'gopherlib'
>>> q = Path(p.parent, p.stem + p.suffix)
>>> q
PosixPath('/usr/lib/python2.5/gopherlib.py')
>>> q == p
True
>>>

One important difference though. Unipath’s Path is a subclass of str, thus whenever a function needs a string, you can pass a Path object. However, it’s not true for pathlib’s PosixPath. It means that if you need the string representation of a PosixPath, you need to convert it manually.

Example:

>>> import os
>>> from pathlib import Path
>>> p = Path("/usr/lib/python2.5/gopherlib.py")
>>> os.path.exists(p)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.5/genericpath.py", line 19, in exists
    os.stat(path)
TypeError: argument should be string, bytes or integer, not PosixPath
>>> os.path.exists(str(p))    # here
False
>>> 

Some other features

>>> from pathlib import Path
>>> Path.home()
PosixPath('/home/jabba')    # Were you also fed up with os.path.expanduser('~') ?
>>> p = Path('/tmp/na.txt')
>>> p.chmod(0o644)
>>> p.exists()
True
>>> p.is_file()
True
>>> p.is_dir()
False
>>> 
>>> p = Path('/tmp/ehh.txt')
>>> p.exists()
False
>>> p.touch()    # At last! We have `touch` in the stdlib!
>>> p.exists()
True

Painless read from / write to file

>>> p = Path('my_text_file')
>>> p.write_text('Text file contents')    # newline is NOT added automatically
18
>>> p.read_text()
'Text file contents'

More details in the official docs.

touch a file

Problem
In bash, the command “touch” creates an empty file (with size 0). How to do this in Python?

Solution
Simply open a file in write mode and write an empty string to it.

With the stdlib:

with open("empty.txt", "w") as f:
    f.write("")

With the excellent unipath library:

p = Path("empty.txt")
p.write_file("")

Note that this solution will overwrite your file if it exists. So be careful.