Question

I know that to go up to a parent directory, you should use

parentname = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(yourpath, os.path.pardir))

But what if I want to get the name of a directory a few folders up?

Say I am given /stuff/home/blah/pictures/myaccount/album, and I want to get the names of the last two folders of “myaccount” and “album” (not the paths, just the names) to use in my script. How do I do that?

Answer 1

>>> p='/stuff/home/blah/pictures/myaccount/album'
>>> os.path.abspath(p).split(os.sep)[-1]
'album'
>>> os.path.abspath(p).split(os.sep)[-2]
'myaccount'
>>> os.path.abspath(p).split(os.sep)[-3]
'pictures'
>>> os.path.abspath(p).split(os.sep)[-4]
'blah'

etc…