Hi,
Purpose: obtaining the system (“short”) path from a full path
Background: File dialogs (visual studio) return a full path (e.g. f=“C:\this path has spaces\thisfilenameislongerthan8char.txt”). If this value is provided to Python, it will not recongize this as a file. In fact os.path.isfile(f) doesn’t return false, it crashes. Likewise, when calling executables (from Python) with files as arguments a short path is required. VB FileSystemObject has the ShortPath method, while os.path and path (www.jorendorff.com) modules do not (at least as far as my googling could determine). Why bother creating a COM interface when you’re just going to pass as shell run-time arguments all the values the server is better at computing?
System: Python 2.3; Windows XP
Sample Code:
import win32com.client
import time
import os,sys
import os.path
#-------------------------------------------------------------
def shortpath(x):
z=''
for y in x.split('\\'):
if len(y.split('.')[0])>8:
if ('.' in y):
z=z+'\\'+y.split('.')[0][:6].upper()+'~1'+'.'+y.split('.')[1]
else:
z=z+'\\'+y[:6].upper()+'~1'
else:
z=z+'\\'+y
return z[1:]
#-------------------------------------------------------------
xlApp = win32com.client.Dispatch("Excel.Application")
xlBook = xlApp.ActiveWorkbook
savFile = str(sys.argv[1])
rawFile = str(xlBook.Sheets("Timestamp").TextBox2)
#print os.path.isfile(savFile)
r=shortpath(rawFile)
print r
try:
print os.path.isfile(r)
except:
print 'something rude'
time.sleep(7)
Notes: This code does not account for peer paths or files that share the first 8 characters (and file extension). I’m also aware that this is not the normal means for submitting a “patch”, but in my job function I don’t see myself regularly participating in python development (and I’m probably not savvy enough) so the effort wasn’t worth it. However I still thought others might benefit from what seems to be (to me) a fundamental path function. Do with it, or ignore it, as you please.
Cheers,
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