"Directory this source file is in (and a sibling)"

Sion Arrowsmith

I have a module which needs to know what directory it's in, and to
refer to files in a sibling directory, something like App/src/foo.py
wants to read App/data/conf.xml . But I have no idea in what context
foo.py is going to be run -- it could be being run as a script, it
could be being imported as a module by another script from anywhere in
the directory structure, it's even possible someone will have called
execfile on it. The following works for everything I've tried:

thisdir = os.path.dirname (os.path.normpa th(__file__))
siblingdir = os.path.normpat h(os.path.join( testdir, os.path.pardir, "sibling"))

However, a colleague expressed disgust at this code, but not really
being a Python programmer had no better suggestions. Is there a neater
way of getting what I want?

--
\S -- si***@chiark.gr eenend.org.uk -- http://www.chaos.org.uk/~sion/
___ | "Frankly I have no feelings towards penguins one way or the other"
\X/ | -- Arthur C. Clarke
her nu becomeþ se bera eadward ofdun hlæddre heafdes bæce bump bump bump

Sep 22 '06 #1

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1793

John Machin

Sion Arrowsmith wrote:

I have a module which needs to know what directory it's in, and to
refer to files in a sibling directory, something like App/src/foo.py
wants to read App/data/conf.xml . But I have no idea in what context
foo.py is going to be run -- it could be being run as a script, it
could be being imported as a module by another script from anywhere in
the directory structure, it's even possible someone will have called
execfile on it. The following works for everything I've tried:

thisdir = os.path.dirname (os.path.normpa th(__file__))
siblingdir = os.path.normpat h(os.path.join( testdir, os.path.pardir, "sibling"))

However, a colleague expressed disgust at this code, but not really
being a Python programmer had no better suggestions. Is there a neater
way of getting what I want?

If you plan to have your code executed out of a zip or an egg, you may
have problems because __file__ is not what you want, at least with eggs
and Python 2.[34]. There was a brief thread on this topic on the
distutils SIG mailing list within the last few days.

HTH,
John

Sep 22 '06 #2

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