How to split the first directory out of the path (such as home/tom/cat >> tom/cat >> cat) in python?

Question

As example from the title, I want the result:

Dir : home/tom/cat

first cut : tom/cat

second cut: /cat

last cut: /

How to do it in python?

Answer 1

Is this what you're looking for:

In [101]: dir = "home/tom/cat"

In [102]: dir.split('/')
Out[102]: ['home', 'tom', 'cat']

You might also want to split on os.path.sep to be cross-platform compatible

Answer 2

Is this what you're looking for? Assuming that your strings look like that (ie no leading slash), you could try a generator. Note that this doesn't match your output above because I wasn't sure as to why the first pass would return tom/cat but the second pass would return /cat (with the slash in front). You could modify this to yield a 'default' (such as / ) when the while loop completes if that is what you wanted. If your strings will include a leading / , you can adjust by stripping out empty elements from your split:

In [1]: def PathSplit(s):
   ...:     split_len = len(s.split('/'))
   ...:     yield s
   ...:     if split_len > 1:
   ...:         while split_len > 1:
   ...:             splitter = s.split('/', 1)[1]
   ...:             yield splitter
   ...:             s = splitter
   ...:             split_len = len(s.split('/'))
   ...:
   ...:

In [2]: for i in PathSplit('home/tom/cat'):
   ...:     print i
   ...:
   ...:
home/tom/cat
tom/cat
cat

In [3]: for i in PathSplit('home/tom/cat/another/long/dir'):
   ...:     print i
   ...:
   ...:
home/tom/cat/another/long/dir
tom/cat/another/long/dir
cat/another/long/dir
another/long/dir
long/dir
dir

Answer 3

import os

def split_path(s):
    while os.sep in s:
        rv, s = s.split(os.sep, 1)
        yield s

for split in split_path("home/tom/cat"):
    print split

# prints
tom/cat
cat

Answer 4

safer way than just splitting on the '/':

In [135]: import os

In [136]: dir = '/home/tom/cat'

In [137]: os.path.basename(dir)
Out[137]: 'cat'

Answer 5

This cuts the first directory in your string:

dir = 'home/tom/cat'
parts = dir.split('/')
print '/'.join(parts[1:])

It splits the string into an array of dirs, then joins all but the first of them together again. Removes the first directory on each cut.

Answer 6

You can split and rejoin with the os module:

import os

def cutPath(path):
    return os.path.join(os.path.split(path)[1:])

Answer 7

i might use something like this for to get the output of each step:

import os

path = "home/tom/cat"
while path:
    base = os.path.basename(path)
    path = path.rstrip(base)

    print base

Answer 8

Here's a clean answer I haven't seen elsewhere:

>>> mypath="first/second/third/fourth/fifth.txt"
>>> mypath.split('/',1)
['first', 'second/third/fourth/fifth.txt']
>>> mypath.split('/',1)[1]
'second/third/fourth/fifth.txt'

Split can split a string at the first split.