bpo-21041: Add negative indexing to pathlib path parents by ypankovych · Pull Request #21799 · python/cpython

As I can see, pathlib path parents don't support negative indexing:

>>> import pathlib
>>> path = pathlib.PosixPath("some/very/long/path/here")
>>> path.parents[-1]
...
    raise IndexError(idx)
IndexError: -1

That's kinda weird for python. I mean, in regular list/etc if I need the last element, I'd normally do list[-1], but here to get the last parent, I need to actually know how many parents do I have.

So now, I can do something like this:

>>> parents_count = len(path.parents) - 1
>>> path.parents[parents_count]
PosixPath('.')

So that's how I can get the last parent. But is it pythonic? No.

So, I decided to fix this, and now we can do negative indexing:

>>> path.parents[-1] == path.parents[parents_count]
True
>>> path.parents[-2] == path.parents[parents_count - 1]
True

https://bugs.python.org/issue21041