I’m scratching my head over something weird in Google Colab. I mounted my Drive and tried to save files using two different paths: one with a space (‘/content/drive/My Drive/’) and one without (‘/content/drive/MyDrive/’).
Surprisingly, both seemed to work fine. Colab said the files existed in both places. But when I checked my actual Google Drive, only one file was there.
Here’s a quick example of what I mean:
from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')
path1 = '/content/drive/My Drive/test.txt'
path2 = '/content/drive/MyDrive/test.txt'
with open(path1, 'w') as f:
f.write('hello')
with open(path2, 'w') as f:
f.write('world')
print(open(path1).read()) # Prints 'world'
print(open(path2).read()) # Also prints 'world'
What’s going on here? Are ‘My Drive’ and ‘MyDrive’ actually the same thing in Colab? If so, how does that work behind the scenes? If not, why is it behaving this way?
I’ve tried a bunch of other tests with escaping spaces and using shell commands, but I’m still confused. Can anyone explain what’s happening?
You’ve stumbled upon an interesting peculiarity in Colab’s file handling. Indeed, Colab treats ‘My Drive’ and ‘MyDrive’ as equivalent paths when interacting with Google Drive. This behavior is intentional and designed to simplify file operations, especially given the inconsistencies in how different systems handle spaces in file paths.
Behind the scenes, Colab likely normalizes these paths before passing them to the underlying file system operations. This means whether you use spaces or not, you’re effectively working with the same location in your Google Drive.
For consistency and to avoid potential issues, it’s advisable to stick to one convention throughout your projects. Personally, I prefer using ‘My Drive’ as it aligns with the visual representation in the Google Drive interface. However, either format will work reliably in Colab.
I’ve run into this exact issue before, and it definitely caused some head-scratching moments! From my experience, Colab does indeed treat ‘My Drive’ and ‘MyDrive’ as the same path. This quirk is actually quite handy once you get used to it.
In my projects, I’ve found it’s best to stick to one convention consistently. Personally, I use ‘My Drive’ because it matches what I see in the Google Drive interface. It helps keep things clear when I’m switching between Colab and my actual Drive folder.
One thing to watch out for: this behavior is specific to Colab. If you’re using Python scripts outside of Colab to interact with your Drive, you’ll need to be more precise with your path naming. I learned that the hard way when trying to port some Colab code to a local script!
Ultimately, while it might seem odd at first, this flexible path handling in Colab can save you some headaches when dealing with spaces in file paths.
hey, im not totally surprised. colab actually ignores spaces, so it treats ‘my drive’ and ‘mydrive’ alike. it’s a quirk but stick to one style to aver any confushun. cheers!