Working with Paths

Before opening a file, you need a path that points to it, and getting that path right is harder than it looks. The separator differs between operating systems, relative paths depend on where the program was started, user inputs often arrive with shortcuts like ~ or .. that have to be expanded, and string concatenation makes a mess of all of it. This lesson covers the building blocks: how Python represents paths, the functions in os.path for joining and splitting them, the common anchor points (home, current directory, temp), and the modern pathlib.Path alternative.