I love Python because it comes batteries included, and I use built-in functions, a lot, to do the dirty job for me.

I have always been using happily the os.path module to deal with file path but recently I ended up with unexpected results on Python 2.5 under Ubuntu linux, while dealing with string that represent windows file paths :

filepath = r"c:\ttemp\FILEPA~1.EXE"
print os.path.basename(filepath)
'c:\\ttemp\\FILEPA~1.EXE']
print os.path.splitdrive(filepath)
('', 'c:\ttemp\\FILEPA~1.EXE')

WTF ?

It ends up the same way with filepath = u"c:\ttemp\FILEPA~1.EXE" and filepath = "c:\ttemp\FILEPA~1.EXE".

Do you have a clue ? Ubuntu use UTF8 but I don't feel like it has something to do with it. Maybe my Python install is messed up but I did not perform any particular tweak on it that I can remember.

If you want to manipulate Windows paths on linux you should use the ntpath module (this is the module that is imported as os.path on windows - posixpath is imported as os.path on linux)

>>> import ntpath
>>> filepath = r"c:\ttemp\FILEPA~1.EXE"
>>> print ntpath.basename(filepath)
FILEPA~1.EXE
>>> print ntpath.splitdrive(filepath)
('c:', '\\ttemp\\FILEPA~1.EXE')