Open File in Another Directory Python

Question

I ve always been sort of confused on the subject of directory traversal in Python  and have a situation I m curious about  I have a file that I want to access in a directory essentially parallel to the one I m currently in  Given this directory structure    parentDirectory      subfldr1         -testfile txt      subfldr2         -fileOpener py   I m trying to script in fileOpener py to get out of subfldr2  get into subfldr1  and then call an open   on testfile txt   From browsing stackoverflow  I ve seen people use os and os path to accomplish this  but I ve only found examples regarding files in subdirectories beneath the script s origin    Working on this  I realized I could just relocate the script into subfldr1 and then all would be well  but my curiosity is piqued as to how this would be accomplished   EDIT  This question pertains particularly to a Windows machine  as I don t know how drive letters and backslashes would factor into this

User · Accepted Answer

If you know the full path to the file you can just do something similar to this. However if you question directly relates to relative paths, that I am unfamiliar with and would have to research and test.

path = 'C:\\Users\\Username\\Path\\To\\File'

with open(path, 'w') as f:
    f.write(data)

Edit:

Here is a way to do it relatively instead of absolute. Not sure if this works on windows, you will have to test it.

import os

cur_path = os.path.dirname(__file__)

new_path = os.path.relpath('..\\subfldr1\\testfile.txt', cur_path)
with open(new_path, 'w') as f:
    f.write(data)

Edit 2: One quick note about __file__, this will not work in the interactive interpreter due it being ran interactively and not from an actual file.

User · Answer

from pathlib import Path  data folder   Path  source data text files    file to open   data folder    raw data txt   f   open file to open  print f read

User · Answer

Its a very old question but I think it will help newbies line me who are learning python  If you have Python 3 4 or above  the pathlib library comes with the default distribution   To use it  you just pass a path or filename into a new Path   object using forward slashes and it handles the rest  To indicate that the path is a raw string  put r in front of the string with your actual path   For example   from pathlib import Path  dataFolder   Path r D  Desktop dump example txt     Source  The easy way to deal with file paths on Windows  Mac and Linux   unicode error   unicodeescape  codec can t decode bytes in position 2-3  truncated  UXXXXXXXX escape

User · Answer

import os import os path import shutil   You find your current directory   d   os getcwd    Gets the current working directory   Then you change one directory up   os chdir        Go up one directory from working directory   Then you can get a tupple list of all the directories  for one directory up   o    os path join d o  for o in os listdir d  if os path isdir os path join d o      Gets all directories in the folder as a tuple   Then you can search the tuple for the directory you want and open the file in that directory   for item in o      if os path exists item      testfile txt        file   item      testfile txt    Then you can do stuf with the full file path  file

[python] Open File in Another Directory (Python)

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