Accessing Files with Relative Paths in Python Projects

When manipulating files within a Python project, relative paths are often employed for convenience. However, their behavior can become ambiguous, particularly when dealing with multi-level project structures.

Consider the following project layout:

project
    /data
        test.csv
    /package
        __init__.py
        module.py
    main.py

Module module.py attempts to read a file in ../data/test.csv using a relative path, but upon running main.py, an error arises indicating the file is not found. This apparent inconsistency stems from the fact that the relative path is resolved differently depending on where the script is executed.

In the case of __init__.py and module.py, the path is evaluated relative to the directory containing these files. However, for main.py, the path is relative to its own location.

Resolving the Path Ambiguity

To resolve this ambiguity, absolute paths can be used. Alternatively, a more elegant approach is to utilize Python's __file__ attribute:

from pathlib import Path

path = Path(__file__).parent / "../data/test.csv"

with path.open() as f:
    test = list(csv.reader(f))

This trick relies on Python's 3.4 pathlib module and constructs an absolute path based on the current script's location.

Supporting Older Python Versions

If Python versions below 3.4 are still in use, an alternative method involves manipulating the current path:

import csv
import os.path

my_path = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
path = os.path.join(my_path, "../data/test.csv")

with open(path) as f:
    test = list(csv.reader(f))

This approach combines os.path functions to achieve the same result as the pathlib-based method.