I want to copy too long paths with python using shutil.copyfile.
Now I read this Copy a file with a too long path to another directory in Python page to get the solution. I used:
shutil.copyfile(r'\\\\?\\' + ErrFileName,testPath+"\\"+FilenameforCSV+"_lyrErrs"+timestrLyr+".csv")
to copy the file but it gives me an error : [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '\\\\?\\C:\\...
Can anyone please let me know how to incorporate longs paths with Shutil.copyfile, the method I used above should allow 32k characters inside a file path, but I cant even reach 1000 and it gives me this error.
Since the \\?\ prefix bypasses normal path processing, the path needs to be absolute, can only use backslash as the path separator, and has to be a UTF-16 string. In Python 2, use the u prefix to create a unicode string (UTF-16 on Windows).
shutil.copyfile opens the source file in 'rb' mode and destination file in 'wb' mode, and then copies from source to destination in 16 KiB chunks. Given a unicode path, Python 2 opens a file by calling the C runtime function _wfopen, which in turn calls the Windows wide-character API CreateFileW.
shutil.copyfile should work with long paths, assuming they're correctly formatted. If it's not working for you, I can't think of any way to "force" it to work.
Here's a Python 2 example that creates a 10-level tree of directories, each named u'a' * 255, and copies a file from the working directory into the leaf of the tree. The destination path is about 2600 characters, depending on your working directory.
#!python2
import os
import shutil
work = 'longpath_work'
if not os.path.exists(work):
os.mkdir(work)
os.chdir(work)
# create a text file to copy
if not os.path.exists('spam.txt'):
with open('spam.txt', 'w') as f:
f.write('spam spam spam')
# create 10-level tree of directories
name = u'a' * 255
base = u'\\'.join([u'\\\\?', os.getcwd(), name])
if os.path.exists(base):
shutil.rmtree(base)
rest = u'\\'.join([name] * 9)
path = u'\\'.join([base, rest])
os.makedirs(path)
print 'src directory listing (tree created)'
print os.listdir(u'.')
dest = u'\\'.join([path, u'spam.txt'])
shutil.copyfile(u'spam.txt', dest)
print '\ndest directory listing'
print os.listdir(path)
print '\ncopied file contents'
with open(dest) as f:
print f.read()
# Remove the tree, and verify that it's removed:
shutil.rmtree(base)
print '\nsrc directory listing (tree removed)'
print os.listdir(u'.')
Output (line wrapped):
src directory listing (tree created)
[u'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaa', u'spam.txt']
dest directory listing
[u'spam.txt']
copied file contents
spam spam spam
src directory listing (tree removed)
[u'spam.txt']
