Check if pathlib.Path is a file or directory without pathlib.Path exist on directory

Question

How to tell if pathlib.Path is a file or dir path without being physically present on disk. I do not want to check if the actual file exists on the disk. Something like this.

from pathlib import Path

home = Path.home()

def function_to_differentiate_file_and_dir(filepath):
    return 'file' is filepath is file
    return 'dir' if filepath is dir


assert function_to_differentiate_file_and_dir(home / 'test.txt') == 'file'
assert function_to_differentiate_file_and_dir(home / 'test.txt') == 'file'

What have you tried?:

def function_to_differentiate_file_and_dir(filepath):
    return 'file' if filepath.suffix else 'dir'

Answer 1

To summarize my and others' comments: it's not possible. There is nothing in a path string that can indicate file or dir with any reliability (except trailing [back]slash, but it's stripped by pathlib.Path object):

>>> pathlib.Path('/var/')
PosixPath('/var')

You could try devising some heuristics for your particular use case, based on file extensions your code might encounter with pathlib.Path.suffix that you've mentioned, but in a general case there are pretty obvious issues with that approach:

• /home/user/documents.txt/ might very well exist (being a directory)
• on UNIX-like systems files with no extension are ubiquitous, take e.g. /bin/cat