How to get windows short name in python?

Question

I need to determine the short name of Windows from my Python code. For this, I can find a solution using win32api.

import win32api long_file_name='C:\Program Files\I am a file' short_file_name=win32api.GetShortPathName(long_file_name) 

Link: http://blog.lowkster.com/2008/10/spaces-in-directory-names-i-really-love.html

Unfortunately, for this I need to install pywin32 or ActivePython , which is impossible in my case.

Also a link from SO:

Getting shortcut in python: Getting shortcut in python

Answer 1

You can use ctypes . According to the MSDN documentation , GetShortPathName is located in KERNEL32.DLL . Note that the real functions are GetShortPathNameW for characters w ide (Unicode) and GetShortPathNameA for single-byte characters. Since wide characters are more general, we will use this version. First install the prototype in accordance with the documentation:

 import ctypes from ctypes import wintypes _GetShortPathNameW = ctypes.windll.kernel32.GetShortPathNameW _GetShortPathNameW.argtypes = [wintypes.LPCWSTR, wintypes.LPWSTR, wintypes.DWORD] _GetShortPathNameW.restype = wintypes.DWORD 

GetShortPathName used by first invoking it without a destination buffer. It will return the number of characters needed to create the destination buffer. Then you call it again with a buffer of this size. If, due to a TOCTTOU problem, the return value is still larger, continue to try and you are fine. So:

 def get_short_path_name(long_name): """ Gets the short path name of a given long path. http://stackoverflow.com/a/23598461/200291 """ output_buf_size = 0 while True: output_buf = ctypes.create_unicode_buffer(output_buf_size) needed = _GetShortPathNameW(long_name, output_buf, output_buf_size) if output_buf_size >= needed: return output_buf.value else: output_buf_size = needed