Elegant way to make all dirs in a path

Here are four paths:

p1=r'\foo\bar\foobar.txt'
p2=r'\foo\bar\foo\foo\foobar.txt'
p3=r'\foo\bar\foo\foo2\foobar.txt'
p4=r'\foo2\bar\foo\foo\foobar.txt'

The directories may or may not exist on a drive. What would be the most elegant way to create the directories in each path?

I was thinking about using os.path.split() in a loop, and checking for a dir with os.path.exists, but I don't know it there's a better approach.

Solution 1:

You are looking for os.makedirs() which does exactly what you need.

The documentation states:

Recursive directory creation function. Like mkdir(), but makes all intermediate-level directories needed to contain the leaf directory. Raises an error exception if the leaf directory already exists or cannot be created.

Because it fails if the leaf directory already exists you'll want to test for existence before calling os.makedirs().

Solution 2:

On Python 3.6+ you can do:

import pathlib

path = pathlib.Path(p4)
path.parent.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)