Reading excel file with pandas in python how to fix : FileNotFoundError(2, 'No such file or directory')

Question

My ultimate goal is to get the data from two columns so I can plot and filter it, so I am trying to convert that data into an array. So I am trying to import data from two columns in an excel spreadsheet but pandas won't find the file.

 #C:\Users\curti is my cwd
 df = pd.read_excel('\Desktop\My Undergrad Thesis\Raw Data Raw Nitrogen\Compiled Data - Raw (Nitrogen).xlsm', sheetname='2018_10_22_Test6') 
 df.head()

 print('success')

I'm sure it is something obvious but I have been looking online for a while and nothing has fixed it, so if someone could point me in the right direction that would be great! Also if there's a better way to achieve my goal please let me know.

Answer 1

The issue here is related to how Python reads strings and therefore would affect file inputs.

\\ in Python is a special character also known as an escape character in representing other special characters such as \\n or \\t . For example \\n returns the newline character. To actually print a backslash you will need to use \\\\ .

'\\Desktop\\My Undergrad Thesis\\Raw Data Raw Nitrogen\\Compiled Data - Raw (Nitrogen).xlsm'

or you can also use the 'r' literal which is described in the Python documentation:

Both string and bytes literals may optionally be prefixed with a letter 'r' or 'R'; such strings are called raw strings and treat backslashes as literal characters. As a result, in string literals, '\\U' and '\\u\u0026#39; escapes in raw strings are not treated specially. Given that Python 2.x's raw unicode literals behave differently than Python 3.x's the 'ur' syntax is not supported.