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Practical Maya Programming with Python

You're reading from   Practical Maya Programming with Python Unleash the power of Python in Maya and unlock your creativity

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2014
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781849694728
Length 352 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Robert Galanakis Robert Galanakis
Author Profile Icon Robert Galanakis
Robert Galanakis
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Table of Contents (12) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Introspecting Maya, Python, and PyMEL FREE CHAPTER 2. Writing Composable Code 3. Dealing with Errors 4. Leveraging Context Managers and Decorators in Maya 5. Building Graphical User Interfaces for Maya 6. Automating Maya from the Outside 7. Taming the Maya API 8. Unleashing the Maya API through Python 9. Becoming a Part of the Python Community A. Python Best Practices Index

Path building and manipulation

You will often have to construct file system paths using Python. For example, given the variable mydir which points to some path, you may want to get the path two folders up:

otherdir = mydir + '\\..\\..'

Do not build or manipulate paths this way. There are a number of things wrong with this code. The obvious problem is that it is platform-dependent. Windows and Linux-based systems use different path separators.

Even more importantly, this code (and code that uses the value of otherdir) can break depending on the value of mydir and which operating system is being used. In Windows, drive roots like C:\ are usually returned with a trailing slash, while other folders, like C:\Windows, are not. There are all sorts of other edge cases that can cause bugs if you do not handle paths properly.

As another strike against it, adding paths has the same downsides as adding strings, including poor performance and readability. Refer to the String concatenation section...

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