Question

Is there a built-in function in Python that would replace (or remove, whatever) the extension of a filename (if it has one)?

Example:

print replace_extension('/home/user/somefile.txt', '.jpg')

In my example: /home/user/somefile.txt would become /home/user/somefile.jpg

I don’t know if it matters, but I need this for a SCons module I’m writing. (So perhaps there is some SCons specific function I can use ?)

I’d like something clean. Doing a simple string replacement of all occurrences of .txt within the string is obviously not clean. (This would fail if my filename is somefile.txt.txt.txt)

Answer 1

Try os.path.splitext it should do what you want.

import os
print os.path.splitext('/home/user/somefile.txt')[0]+'.jpg'  # /home/user/somefile.jpg

os.path.splitext('/home/user/somefile.txt')  # returns ('/home/user/somefile', '.txt')