根据文本列表将文件移动到不同的文件夹 Python

Question

I´m new to python and I´ve been trying to simplify a manual task that I do on my daily bases, I have a text file with a list of file names separated in groups by a blank line, like this:

fileName1
fileName2 
fileName3
fileName4

fileName5
fileName6
fileName7
fileName8

fileName9
fileName10 
fileName11
fileName12  

All of this files are in one folder and I want to find each group of files and move them into separate folders the name of the new folders should be the name of the first file of each group.

I´m doing my research and I found how to do each step separately using os and shutil modules but I can´t find a way to join them together and make a beautiful script, any help that I can get from you guys will be awesome, thanks!!

Answer 1

Here's a little script that can do that. I've made two assumptions:

1. The file with the list of files is stored in the same directory as source files
2. There is a blank line after the last file so the script can grab the last group

import os
from shutil import move
from itertools import groupby

#Where the files are originally stored
src_path = "C:\\temp\\src\\"

#Where the group folders will go
dest_path = "C:\\temp\\dest\\"

#Open up the file containing the list of files
with open(src_path + "list_of_files.txt") as txt:
    lines = txt.readlines() #Read the file

    #Split the contents of the file based on the newline character "\n"
    i = (list(g) for _, g in groupby(lines, key='\n'.__ne__))
    list_of_groups = [a + b for a, b in zip(i, i)]

    #Iterate through each group
    for group in list_of_groups:
        folder_name = dest_path + group[0].replace("\n","") + "\\"
        
        if not os.path.exists(folder_name):
            #Create a folder for each group if it doesn't already exist
            os.mkdir(folder_name)
        
        #Move over each file in the group. The last element in the group is a newline character
        for file in group:
            if file != "\n":
                move(src_path + file.replace("\n",""),folder_name + file.replace("\n",""))

Answer 2

When reading a file you can look up characters. Blank spaces have a character as represented by .

import os

filepath1 = os.getcwd() # current working directory
filepath2 = "path\\to\\where\\you\\want\\dir"
filename = os.path.join(filepath1,"yourfilename.txt") 
dirName = []
groupName = "filegroup"
idx = 1
newPath = ""
init = True
file = open(filename, "r")
for line in file:
    if init == True:  # initial folder
        newPath = os.path.join(filepath2,groupName + str(idx))
        os.mkdir(newPath)
        dirName.append(groupName)
        init = False
            
    if line == "\n":  # line in file is empty
        idx += 1
        newName = groupName + str(idx)
        dirName.append(newName)
        newPath = filepath2 + dirName[idx-1]
        os.mkdir(newPath)   
    else:
        os.mkdir(os.path.join(newPath,line.rstrip())) 

file.close()