Python pathlib and paths with especial chars and white spaces

Question

friends. I’m stucked with a problem and I appreciate some help. I’m coding a Python program that will search an entire directory tree and iterate over files to find those that was accessed for the last time more than a certain time ago like more than two years ago.

I’m working with pathlib com accomplish this task. The problem is that I have some paths that has special chars and somes white spaces and it’s leading me to a FileNotFoundError.

Here is an example:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from pathlib import Path

path = r"E:\MY DIR\#SOME_DIR\#SOME_SUBDIR\ANOTHER_SUBDIR\firstname.lastname\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe\AC\#!001\MicrosoftEdge\Cache\LJ53QTBW\FaktCyrWeb-Normal-0038c5aa5c3243bb2995139e9aeb9519f62f098d0e0f7fab6c8b655a292d857d[1].woff"


print(Path(path).stat().st_atime)

Like I said, the code above raises an FileNotFoundError exception.

Is there a way to accomplish this? To make Python access this path?

Answer 1

I think that Windows does not accept path with more 256 characters: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file#maximum-path-length-limitation

Try this:

#/usr/bin/python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import os
from pathlib import Path

def longpath(path):
    regular = os.fspath(path.resolve())
    if not regular.startswith('\\\\?\\'):
        regular = '\\\\?\\' + regular
    return Path(regular)

path = Path(r"E:\MY             DIR\#SOME_DIR\#SOME_SUBDIR\ANOTHER_SUBDIR\firstname.lastname\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe\AC\#!001\MicrosoftEdge\Cache\LJ53QTBW\FaktCyrWeb-Normal-0038c5aa5c3243bb2995139e9aeb9519f62f098d0e0f7fab6c8b655a292d857d[1].woff")
path_long = longpath(path)
print(Path(path_long).stat().st_atime)