How can I only compress selected individual files in py7zr?

Question

I have a list that includes the paths of the files (in my case movies), which is called collectMovies and has followed data structure:

['C:\\Users\\UserName\\Desktop\\Movies\\pso-cash-sd.mkv',
'C:\\Users\\UserName\\Desktop\\Movies\\hda-casino.royale.uncut-1080p.mkv']

How can I compress the movies, so that only the movie and not the whole directories are compressed and shown up in the 7zip archive?

What I tried was that:

import py7zr

with py7zr.SevenZipFile("files.7z","w") as mov:
    for val in collectMovies:
        val = val.replace(r"\\",r"\\")
        try:
            mov.write(val)
        except:
            print("File not Found")

This works, but it writes also the directories. I only want to write the movie file in the archive.

C:\\Users\\UserName\\Desktop\\Movies\\pso-cash-sd.mkv

What I want is, that only pso-cash-sd.mkv is shown up in the compressed archive.

The actual output looks like this (with subfolders):

What I want is, that only the movie(s) are shown up, like:

Answer 1

Option 1: Eliminate building a list of images from the Movies directory and having to manipulate the path string by using os.listdir() and os.chdir() . IMHO this is a cleaner and less error prone method, should you want to change the path to your movie files.

import os
import py7zr

movie_dir = r'"C:\Users\UserName\Desktop\Movies\"'

with py7zr.SevenZipFile('files.7z','w') as mov:
    for item in os.listdir(movie_dir):
        try:
            os.chdir(movie_dir)
            mov.write(item)
        except:  
            print('File not Found')  

Option 2: Use the list method used in your original question, extract the movie filename from the path string and use os.chdir() .

import os
import py7zr

movie_dir = r'"C:\Users\UserName\Desktop\Movies\"'

collectMovies = ['C:\\Users\\UserName\\Desktop\\Movies\\pso-cash-sd.mkv',
'C:\\Users\\UserName\\Desktop\\Movies\\hda-casino.royale.uncut-1080p.mkv']

with py7zr.SevenZipFile('files.7z','w') as mov:
    for val in collectMovies:
        # extract file name from path:
        val = val.split('\\')[5]
        try:
            os.chdir(movie_dir)
            mov.write(val)
        except:
            print('File not Found')