Extracting extension from filename in Python?

Question

Is there a function to extract the extension from a filename?

Answer 1

Yes, there are at least two ways of doing this. The first way uses the os.path module and the second uses the pathlib module.

import os.path

filename = "name.ext"

print(os.path.splitext(filename)[1])

os.path.splitext returns a tuple containing the name and extension with the preceding '.' character. The code above will print out the string ".ext".

Using pathlib

from pathlib import Path

path = Path("filename.ext")

print(path.suffix)

The pathlib module contains the Path class which has many methods for interacting with file paths. The .suffix property returns the file extension with preceding period.