How can I get the path to the %APPDATA% directory in Python?

Question

How can I get the path to the %APPDATA% directory in Python?

Answer 1

import os
print os.getenv('APPDATA')

Answer 2

You may use os.path.expandvars(path):

Return the argument with environment variables expanded. Substrings of the form $name or ${name} are replaced by the value of environment variable name. Malformed variable names and references to non-existing variables are left unchanged.

On Windows, %name% expansions are supported in addition to $name and ${name}.

This comes handy when combining the expanded value with other path components.

Example:

from os import path

sendto_dir = path.expandvars(r'%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo')
dumps_dir = path.expandvars(r'%LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps')

Answer 3

Although the question clearly asks about the Windows-specific %APPDATA% directory, perhaps you have ended up here looking for a cross-platform solution for getting the application data directory for the current user, which varies by OS.

As of Python 3.10, somewhat surprisingly, there is no built-in function to find this directory. However, there are third-party packages, the most popular of which seems to be appdirs, which provides functions to retrieve paths such as:

• user data dir (user_data_dir)
• user config dir (user_config_dir)
• user cache dir (user_cache_dir)
• site data dir (site_data_dir)
• site config dir (site_config_dir)
• user log dir (user_log_dir)

Answer 4

You can try doing:

import os
path = os.getenv('APPDATA')
array = os.listdir(path)
print array