Python path as a string

Question

I am specifying a relative file path using jacaro's path module.

How can I get the absolute path from this variable as a string?

import path # From https://github.com/jaraco/path.py
path = path.path('~/folder/')
relative_filename = path.joinpath('foo')
# how can I get the absolute path of as a string?
absolute_path = ???
fd = open(absolute_path)

• munk: What function needs a string? By total path do you mean the absolute path like /home/foo/myapp? Can you show an example?
• Slot: Yes, by total path I mean absolute path. The function that needs a string is SFTPClient.open from paramiko module. Thank you for your answer.
• munk: So you need filename to be a string? As a side note, you're overriding the name path with path = path('~/folder/'). A better name would be folder_path = ...

Answer 1

filename has a method called abspath that returns an object with the absolute path. You can cast that to a string.

...
from path import Path
folder_path = Path('/home/munk/folder/')
filename = folder_path.joinpath('foo')
absolute_path = filename.abspath()
print(absolute_path) # '/home/munk/folder/foo'
f = open(absolute_path, 'r')

UPDATE 2023年03月24日: Actually use abspath + use the up to date path library

• micseydel: Calling str() seems weird to me, I might expect something like what repr() would produce. I would have expected an as_string attribute or something.
• Peter Mortensen: But abspath is not used in the example(?).
• Lei Yang: why do i only see .absolute() method?

Answer 2

Python 3

from pathlib import Path
path = Path('~/folder/foo')
absolute_path = path.absolute().as_posix()

Python 2

import os
absolute_path = os.path.abspath('~/folder/foo').as_posix()

• zoltanctoth: pathlib.Path.absolute() doesn't return a string; it returns a PosixPath/WindowsPath object.