Question

let’s say i have directory paths looking like this:

this/is/the/basedir/path/a/include
this/is/the/basedir/path/b/include
this/is/the/basedir/path/a
this/is/the/basedir/path/b

In Python, how can i split these paths up so they will look like this instead:

a/include
b/include
a
b

If i run os.path.split(path)[1] it will display:

include
include
a
b

What should i be trying out here, should i be looking at some regex command or can this be done without it? Thanks in advance.

EDIT ALL: I solved it using regular expressions, damn handy tool 🙂

Answer 1

Perhaps something like this, depends on how hardcoded your prefix is:

def removePrefix(path, prefix):
    plist = path.split(os.sep)
    pflist = prefix.split(os.sep)
    rest = plist[len(pflist):]
    return os.path.join(*rest)

Usage:

print removePrefix("this/is/the/basedir/path/b/include", "this/is/the/basedir/path")
b/include

Assuming you’re on a platform where the directory separator (os.sep) really is the forward slash).

This code tries to handle paths as something a little more high-level than mere strings. It’s not optimal though, you could (or should) do more cleaning and canonicalization to be safer.