Getting Home Directory with pathlib

Question

Looking through the new pathlib module in Python 3.4, I notice that there isn’t any simple way to get the user’s home directory. The only way I can come up with for getting a user’s home directory is to use the older os.path lib like so:

import pathlib
from os import path
p = pathlib.Path(path.expanduser("~"))

This seems clunky. Is there a better way?

Asked By: Alex Bliskovsky

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Source

Answer 1

It seems that this method was brought up in a bug report here. Some code was written (given here) but unfortunately it doesn’t seem that it made it into the final Python 3.4 release.

Incidentally the code that was proposed was extremely similar to the code you have in your question:

# As a method of a Path object
def expanduser(self):
    """ Return a new path with expanded ~ and ~user constructs
    (as returned by os.path.expanduser)
    """
    return self.__class__(os.path.expanduser(str(self)))

EDIT

Here is a rudimentary subclassed version PathTest which subclasses WindowsPath (I’m on a Windows box but you could replace it with PosixPath). It adds a classmethod based on the code that was submitted in the bug report.

from pathlib import WindowsPath
import os.path

class PathTest(WindowsPath):

    def __new__(cls, *args, **kwargs):
        return super(PathTest, cls).__new__(cls, *args, **kwargs)

    @classmethod
    def expanduser(cls):
        """ Return a new path with expanded ~ and ~user constructs
        (as returned by os.path.expanduser)
        """
        return cls(os.path.expanduser('~'))

p = PathTest('C:/')
print(p) # 'C:/'

q = PathTest.expanduser()
print(q) # C:UsersUsername

Answered By: Ffisegydd

Answer 2

Caveat: This answer is 3.4 specific. As pointed out in other answers, this functionality was added in later versions.

It looks like there is no better way to do it. I just searched the documentation and nothing relevant came up for my search terms.

~ has zero hits
expand has zero hits
user has 1 hit as a return value for Path.owner()
relative has 8 hits, mostly related to PurePath.relative_to()

Answered By: Darrick Herwehe

Answer 3

As of python-3.5, there is pathlib.Path.home(), which improves the situation somewhat.

The result on Windows is

>>>pathlib.Path.home()
WindowsPath('C:/Users/username')

and on Linux

>>>pathlib.Path.home()
PosixPath('/home/username')

Answered By: simon

Answer 4

There is method expanduser():

p = PosixPath('~/films/Monty Python')
p.expanduser()
PosixPath('/home/eric/films/Monty Python')

Answered By: 宏杰李

Answer 5

For people who are lazy to read the comments :

Now there is the pathlib.Path.home method.

Answered By: Espoir Murhabazi

Getting Home Directory with pathlib

Question:

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