Python 3: User's OS Home Directory Path

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On Python 3.5 and higher, you can get the path of the user's operating system (OS) home directory by using the built-in pathlib library:

from pathlib import Path

home_dir = Path.home()

print( f'Path: { home_dir } !' )

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from pathlib import Path

home_dir = Path.home()

print( f'Path: { home_dir } !' )

In the code above, home_dir is an object of class PosixPath (if you're running on Linux or macOS) or WindowsPath (if you're running on Windows). You can print it directly (including inside formatted f-strings as in the example above), but if you want to perform string operations on it, you must first convert it to a string:

from pathlib import Path

home_dir = Path.home()
home_dir_str = str( home_dir )

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from pathlib import Path

home_dir = Path.home()
home_dir_str = str( home_dir )

You can also easily build paths inside the user's home directory using .joinpath(). For example, to build a path representing ~/Documents/myfile.txt (a file named myfile.txt inside the Documents subdirectory in the user's home directory):

from pathlib import Path

filepath = Path.home().joinpath( 'Documents', 'myfile.txt' )

print( filepath )

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from pathlib import Path

filepath = Path.home().joinpath( 'Documents', 'myfile.txt' )

print( filepath )

If you already have a string path like ~/Documents/myfile.txt where you want to replace ~ with the home directory path, you can use .expanduser():

from pathlib import Path

filepath_str = '~/Documents/myfile.txt'
filepath = Path( filepath_str ).expanduser()

print( filepath )

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from pathlib import Path

filepath_str = '~/Documents/myfile.txt'
filepath = Path( filepath_str ).expanduser()

print( filepath )

An alternative to pathlib that is available on all Python 3 versions is the built-in os.path library. You can use os.path.expanduser to get the home directory of the current user:

import os

home_dir = os.path.expanduser( '~' )

print( home_dir )

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import os

home_dir = os.path.expanduser( '~' )

print( home_dir )

To build the path ~/Documents/myfile.txt, you can use os.path.join:

import os

home_dir = os.path.expanduser( '~' )
filepath = os.path.join( home_dir, 'Documents', 'myfile.txt' )

print( filepath )

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import os

home_dir = os.path.expanduser( '~' )
filepath = os.path.join( home_dir, 'Documents', 'myfile.txt' )

print( filepath )

The safe way to build paths is using os.path.join(), but if you already have a string path like ~/Documents/myfile.txt where you want to replace ~ with the home directory path, you can just pass it in directly to .expanduser():

import os

filepath = os.path.expanduser( '~/Documents/myfile.txt' )

print( filepath )

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import os

filepath = os.path.expanduser( '~/Documents/myfile.txt' )

print( filepath )

On Windows, the above code outputs C:\Users\jlee/Documents/myfile.txt, where the slashes are not uniform (i.e., incorrect). To avoid this problem (i.e., for portable code), you should use os.path.join, which automatically chooses the correct file path slashes for the system you're currently using.

• pathlib — Object-oriented filesystem paths — Python 3 documentation
• os.path — Common pathname manipulations — Python 3 documentation

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