How to look up two directories in Python?

Question

I know that to go up to a parent directory, you should use

parentname = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(yourpath, os.path.pardir))

But what if I want to get the name of a directory a few folders up?

Say I am given /stuff/home/blah/pictures/myaccount/album, and I want to get the names of the last two folders of "myaccount" and "album" (not the paths, just the names) to use in my script. How do I do that?

Answer 1

There doesn't look to be anything particularly elegant, but this should do the trick:

>>> yourpath = "/stuff/home/blah/pictures/myaccount/album"
>>> import os.path
>>> yourpath = os.path.abspath(yourpath)
>>> (npath, d1) = os.path.split(yourpath)
>>> (npath, d2) = os.path.split(npath)
>>> print d1
album
>>> print d2
myaccount

Keep in mind that os.path.split will return an empty string for the second component if the supplied path ends in a trailing slash, so you might want to make sure you strip that off first if you don't otherwise validate the format of the supplied path.

Answer 2

What about splitting the path to list and get the last two elements?

>>> import os
>>> path_str = ' /stuff/home/blah/pictures/myaccount/album'
>>> path_str.split(os.sep)
[' ', 'stuff', 'home', 'blah', 'pictures', 'myaccount', 'album']

For the relative path such as . and .. , os.path.abspath() can be used to pre-process the path string.

>>> import os
>>> path_str = os.path.abspath('.')
>>> path_str.split(os.sep)
['', 'tmp', 'foo', 'bar', 'foobar']

Answer 3

>>> p='/stuff/home/blah/pictures/myaccount/album'
>>> os.path.abspath(p).split(os.sep)[-1]
'album'
>>> os.path.abspath(p).split(os.sep)[-2]
'myaccount'
>>> os.path.abspath(p).split(os.sep)[-3]
'pictures'
>>> os.path.abspath(p).split(os.sep)[-4]
'blah'

etc...