Python Program to Get the File Name From the File Path

In this article, we will be looking at the program to get the file name from the given file path in the python programming language.

Sometimes during automation, we might need the file name extracted from the file path. Better to have a knowledge of – 

• Python OS-module
• Python path module
• Regular expressions

Method 1: Get the File Name From the File Path Using Python OS-module

Python3

import os

file_path = 'C:/Users/test.txt'  # file path

# using basename function from os
# module to print file name
file_name = os.path.basename(file_path)

print(file_name)

Output:

test.txt

This method will end up with a file and it’s an extension but what if we need only file name without extension or only extensions. Here splitext function in the os module comes into the picture.

Syntax - os.path.splittext(file_name) 

This method will return a tuple of strings containing filename and text and we can access them with the help of indexing.

Example:

Python3

import os

file_path = 'C:/Users/test.txt'

file_name = os.path.basename(file_path)
file = os.path.splitext(file_name)

print(file)  # returns tuple of string

print(file[0] + file[1])

Output:

('test', '.txt')
test.txt

Method 2: Get the File Name From the File Path Using Pathlib

Syntax: Path(file_path).stem

Stem attribute enables to extracts the filename from the link without extension but if we want an extension with the file we can use name attributes

Example:

Python3

from pathlib import Path

file_path = 'C:/Users/test.txt'

# stem attribute extracts the file
# name
print(Path(file_path).stem)

# name attribute returns full name
# of the file
print(Path(file_path).name)

Output:

test
test.txt

Method 3: Get the File Name From the File Path Using Regular expressions

We can use a regular expression to match the file name with the specific pattern. Please refer to this article for learning regex

Pattern - [\w]+?(?=\.)

This pattern is divided into 3 patterns

• [\w] matches the words inside the set
• +? matches the string if it’s present only once before ? keyword
• (?=) matches all characters without newline and make sure to stop at.

Example:

Python3

import re

file_path = 'C:/Users/test.txt'
pattern = '[\w-]+?(?=\.)'

# searching the pattern
a = re.search(pattern, file_path)

# printing the match
print(a.group())

Output:

test