Extract a part of the filepath (a directory) in Python

Question

I need to extract the name of the parent directory of a certain path. This is what it looks like:

c:\\stuff\\directory_i_need\\subdir\\file

<

Answer 1

First, see if you have splitunc() as an available function within os.path. The first item returned should be what you want... but I am on Linux and I do not have this function when I import os and try to use it.

Otherwise, one semi-ugly way that gets the job done is to use:

>>> pathname = "\\C:\\mystuff\\project\\file.py"
>>> pathname
'\\C:\\mystuff\\project\\file.py'
>>> print pathname
\C:\mystuff\project\file.py
>>> "\\".join(pathname.split('\\')[:-2])
'\\C:\\mystuff'
>>> "\\".join(pathname.split('\\')[:-1])
'\\C:\\mystuff\\project'

which shows retrieving the directory just above the file, and the directory just above that.