Question

I got a list of paths and I need to extract the first element of each path in a portable way,
how would I do that?

['/abs/path/foo',
 'rel/path',
 'just-a-file']

to

['abs', 'rel', 'just-a-file']

Thanks in advance
Oli

Answer 1

In [69]: import os

In [70]: paths
Out[70]: ['/abs/path/foo', 'rel/path', 'just-a-file']

In [71]: [next(part for part in path.split(os.path.sep) if part) for path in paths]
Out[71]: ['abs', 'rel', 'just-a-file']