Long paths in Python on Windows

Question

I have a problem when programming in Python running under Windows. I need to work with file paths, that are longer than 256 or whatsathelimit characters. Now, I\'ve read ba

Answer 1

Well it seems that, as always, I've found the answer to what's been bugging me for a week twenty minutes after I seriously ask somebody about it.

So I've found that I need to make sure two things are done correctly:

1. The path can contain only backslashes, no forward slashes.
2. If I want to do something like list a directory, I need to end the path with a backslash, otherwise Python will append /*.* to it, which is a forward slash, which is bad.

Hope at least someone will find this useful.

Answer 2

py 3.8.2

# Fix long path access:
import ntpath
ntpath.realpath = ntpath.abspath
# Fix long path access.

In my case, this solved the problem of running a script from a long path. (https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/quickstart/python) But this is not a universal fix. It looks like the ntpath.realpath implementation has problems. This code replaced it with a dummy.

Answer 3

Let me just simplify this for anyone looking for a straight answer:

1. Path needs to be unicode, prepend string with u like u'C:\\path\\to\\file'
2. Path needs to start with \\\\?\\ (which is escaped into \\?\) like u'\\\\?\\C:\\path\\to\\file'
3. No forward slashes only backslashes: / --> \\
4. It has to be an absolute path; it does not work for relative paths