Why am I getting a FileNotFoundError

Question

I m trying to write a simple program to read a file and search for a word then print how many times that word is found in the file   Every time I type in  quot test rtf quot   which is the name of my document  I get this error  Traceback  most recent call last     File  quot  Users AshleyStallings Documents School Work Computer Programming Side Projects How many   Python  py quot   line 9  in  lt module gt      fileScan  open fileName   r     Opens file FileNotFoundError   Errno 2  No such file or directory   test rtf   In class last semester  I remember my professor saying you have to save the file in a specific place  I m not sure if he really said that though  but I m running apple OSx if that helps  Here s the important part of my code  fileName  input  quot Please enter the name of the file you d like to use  quot   fileScan  open fileName   r     Opens file

User · Answer

Difficult to give code examples in the comments.

To read the words in the file, you can read the contents of the file, which gets you a string - this is what you were doing before, with the read() method - and then use split() to get the individual words. Split breaks up a String on the delimiter provided, or on whitespace by default. For example,

"the quick brown fox".split()

produces

['the', 'quick', 'brown', 'fox']

Similarly,

fileScan.read().split()

will give you an array of Strings. Hope that helps!

User · Answer

If the user does not pass the full path to the file  on Unix type systems this means a path that starts with a slash   the path is interpreted relatively to the current working directory  The current working directory usually is the directory in which you started the program  In your case  the file test rtf must be in the same directory in which you execute the program  You are obviously performing programming tasks in Python under Mac OS  There  I recommend to work in the terminal  on the command line   i e  start the terminal  cd to the directory where your input file is located and start the Python script there using the command   python script py  In order to make this work  the directory containing the python executable must be in the PATH  a so-called environment variable that contains directories that are automatically used for searching executables when you enter a command  You should make use of this  because it simplifies daily work greatly  That way  you can simply cd to the directory containing your Python script file and run it  In any case  if your Python script file and your data input file are not in the same directory  you always have to specify either a relative path between them or you have to use an absolute path for one of them

User · Answer

Is test rtf located in the same directory you re in when you run this    If not  you ll need to provide the full path to that file    Suppose it s located in    Users AshleyStallings Documents School Work Computer Programming Side Projects data  In that case you d enter   data test rtf  as your file name  Or it could be in    Users AshleyStallings Documents School Work Computer Programming some other folder  In that case you d enter      some other folder test rtf

User · Answer

You might need to change your path by  import os path os chdir str  Here should be the path to your file     This command changes directory  This is what worked for me at least  Hope it works for you too

User · Answer

As noted above the problem is in specifying the path to your file  The default path in OS X is your home directory   Users macbook represented by   in terminal    you can change or rename the home directory with the advanced options in System Preferences   Users  amp  Groups     Or you can specify the path from the drive to your file in the filename   path     Users macbook Documents MyPython   myFile   path   fileName   You can also catch the File Not Found Error and give another response using try   try      with open filename  as f          sequences   pick lines f  except FileNotFoundError      print  File not found  Check the path variable and filename       exit

User · Answer

A good start would be validating the input  In other words  you can make sure that the user has indeed typed a correct path for a real existing file  like this  import os fileName   input  quot Please enter the name of the file you d like to use  quot   while not os path isfile fileName       fileName   input  quot Whoops  No such file  Please enter the name of the file you d like to use  quot    This is with a little help from the built in module os  That is a part of the Standard Python Library

User · Answer

The mistake I did was my code   x   open  python txt   print x  But the problem was in file directory  I saved it as python txt instead of just python   So my file path was - gt C  Users noob Desktop Python Course 2 python txt txt That is why it was giving a error  Name your file without  txt it will run

[python] Why am I getting a FileNotFoundError?

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