How to open several text files in a for loop

Question

I have several text files in a list all_files and I want to make a loop that open each file, get the values inside, close the file and then go to the next.

It didn't work using just f = open('file' ,'r+'') so I tried using the full path and it didn't work either

import os
all_files = os.listdir("text_file")  #my list of files 

for file in all_files:
    f = open("/Users/stordd/Desktop/StageI2M/Leiden/text_file/file", 'r+')

I constantly have the error FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory and i don't understand how to use the os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file __)

Answer 1

Your file string is wrong. It should not be "/Users/stordd/Desktop/StageI2M/Leiden/text_file/file" , because it would look for file named file inside text_file directory in each iteration. Change that string to a formatted one, eg "/Users/stordd/Desktop/StageI2M/Leiden/text_file/{}".format(file) . So finally the code should look like:

import os
all_files = os.listdir("text_file")  #my list of files 

for file in all_files:
    f = open("/Users/stordd/Desktop/StageI2M/Leiden/text_file/{}".format(file), 'r+')

Answer 2

In my case, I am in file_handling directory. The following will help you to figure out.

I did not modify your code and use it (Just tried to make a similar attempt to help you) because I want you to fix by looking at my solution (If you haven't fixed yet).

➜  file_handling git:(master) ✗ pwd
/Users/hygull/Projects/Python3/stkovrflw/2019/try/file_handling

Here, I have 3 files as shown below.

➜  file_handling git:(master) ✗ ls
A.txt     B.txt     reader.py
➜  file_handling git:(master) ✗ 
➜  file_handling git:(master) ✗ cat A.txt 
(A) I know Python
➜  file_handling git:(master) ✗ cat B.txt
(B) Data Science is really cool
➜  file_handling git:(master) ✗ 

Now, below is the Python code executed from /Users/hygull/Projects/Python3/stkovrflw/2019/try/ directory (where file_handling directory resides).

These statements list out the files and read 1 by 1 and print the read content to the console.

Note: Here you don't need to close file explicitly as we are using with statement which takes care of it (Pyhonic way of reading file).

>>> import os
>>> 
>>> all_files = os.listdir('file_handling')
>>> 
>>> all_files
['reader.py', 'B.txt', 'A.txt']
>>> 
>>>
>>> for file in all_files:
...     dir_full_path = os.path.abspath('file_handling')    # e.g. /Users/rishi/file_handling
...     file_full_path = os.path.join(dir_full_path, file)  # e.g. /Users/rishi/file_handling/A.txt 
...     with open(file_full_path, 'r+') as f:
...         content = f.read()
...         print(content)
...         print('---' * 30, '\n')
... 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 

(B) Data Science is really cool

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 

(A) I know Python

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 

>>> 

Answer 3

You could try this:

with open('_name_of_file_', 'r+') as f, open('_name_of_file2_', 'r+') as g:
    something()

It works for an old Python version, keep me in touch.

Update

You can try this (with .txt files here):

import glob
path = /somewhere/you/decide

for file in glob.glob(os.path.join(path, '*.txt')):
     with open(filename, 'r') as f:
     text = f.read()
     print(text)