Tips for writing multi-platform Python code

Additional note: When writing multi-platform code in Python, it is best to avoid making assumptions about the environment, if possible. Python helps quite a bit in that regard by providing facilities that performs certain actions regardless of the platform. A very common example is concatenating filenames and folders.

The following code is not cross-platform because it will fail on a Linux machine.

if not folderName[-1:]=='\\': 
folderName+=r'\\'
pathName=folderName+fileName

Python provides a comprehensive library of path handling routines (os.path) that works regardless of the operating system the script runs on: pathName = os.path.join(folderName,fileName)

The same applies to other operations such as splitting a path. For example, consider the following script:

pathParts = pathName.rsplit(‘/’,1) 
if len(pathParts)==2:
folderName,fileName=pathParts

It would work just as well using the following: folderName,fileName = os.path.split(pathName)

These scripts would work on both operating systems, and also cover corner cases you may not have considered (for example, the input is just a folder and not a filename).