Adding another suffix to a path that already has a suffix with pathlib

python python-3.x pathlib
Morwenn picture Morwenn · Mar 20, 2018 · Viewed 17k times · Source

I was converting some old Python code to use pathlib instead of os.path for most path-related operations, but I ended up with the following problem: I needed to add another extension to a path that already had an extension (not replace it). With os.path, since we are merely manipulating strings, the solution was to add the extension with string operations:

newpath = path + '.res'

It doesn't work with pathlib.Path because it doesn't allow concatenation of arbitrary characters. The closest I could find was the following:

newpath = path.with_suffix(path.suffix + '.res')

It looks like a workaround because it still uses string addition in the end. And it has a new pitfall because I forgot at first to handle the case where there are already several extensions and you want to add a new one, leading to the following code to get back the old behaviour:

newpath = path.with_suffix(''.join(path.suffixes) + '.res')

Now it doesn't feel terse nor clean since it uses more and more string operations to achieve the old behaviour instead of pure path operations. The fact that Path.suffixes exists means that the library's developers considered the case where a file can have multiple extensions, yet I couldn't find a way to simply add a new extension to a path. Is there a more idiomatic way that I have missed to achieve the same behaviour?

EDIT: actually path.with_suffix(path.suffix + '.res') is enough to handle the case where there are already several file extensions, even though it wasn't immeditely obvious to me.

Answer

P-Gn picture P-Gn · Feb 18, 2020

I find the following slightly more satisfying than the answers that have already been given:

new_path = path.parent / (path.name + '.suffix')

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