How to remove .txt or .docx at end of string in python

Question

I am trying to create a list of all file names from a specific directory. My code is below:

import os
#dir = input('Enter the directory: ')
dir = 'C:/Users/brian/Documents/Moeller'
r = os.listdir(dir)
for fnam in os.listdir(dir):
    print(fnam.split())
    sep = fnam.split()

My output is:

['50', 'OP', '856101P02.txt']
['856101P02', 'OP', '040.txt']
['856101P02', 'OP', '50.txt']
['OP', '040', '856101P02.txt']

How would I be able to remove anything to the right of a "." in a string, while keeping the text to the left of the period?

Answer 1

Basically, what you do is start splitting from the right with rsplit and then instruct it to split only once.

print "abcd".rsplit('.',1)[0]

prints abc

Answer 2

You can use os.path.splitext to split a filename to two parts, keeping only the extension in the right, and everything else on the left. For example, a path like some/path/file.tar.gz will be split to some/path/file.tar and .gz :

base, ext = os.path.splitext('path/to/hello.tar.gz')

If you want to get rid of the . in the ext part, simply use ext[1:] .

If the file has no extension, for example path/to/file , then the ext part will be the empty string. This is a nice feature, so that os.path.splitext always returns a tuple of two elements, and this way the base, ext = ... example above always works.

I am trying to create a list of all file names from a specific directory. [...] How would I be able to remove anything to the right of a "." in a string, while keeping the text to the left of the period?

To get the base names (filenames without the extension) of a specific directory somedir , you could use this list comprehension:

basenames = [os.path.splitext(f)[0] for f in os.listdir(somedir)]

Answer 3

From there, find the period and take everything up to that position. In simple steps ...

for fnam in os.listdir(dir):
    nam_split = fnam.split()   # "sep" is usually the separator character
    print(nam_split)
    ext_split = nam_split.rsplit('.', 1)  # Split at only one dot, from the right
    file_no_ext = ext_split[0]    # The first part of the split is the file name
    print(file_no_ext)