FileNotFoundError: No such file or directory. Even though it exists

Question

My code is currently very basic, as this is the start of my project. I run into this error which makes no sence. Here is the code:

import pygame 
import sys

def playsound():
 pygame.mixer.init()
 popsound = pygame.mixer.Sound('C:\School\Computing\flap.wav')
 popsound.play()

print(playsound())

For some reason, this error shows:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/School/Computing/NEA_Project.py", line 9, in <module>
    print(playsound())
  File "C:/School/Computing/NEA_Project.py", line 6, in playsound
    popsound = pygame.mixer.Sound('C:\School\Computing\flap.wav')
FileNotFoundError: No such file or directory.

However, if I pick a different file from the same directory, it works no problem. Anyone got a fix for this?

Answer 1

Change your \ to \\ :

import pygame 
import sys

def playsound():
 pygame.mixer.init()
 popsound = pygame.mixer.Sound('C:\\School\\Computing\\flap.wav')
 popsound.play()

print(playsound())

The reason you should do this is because, in Python strings, backslashes are special characters , called escape characters. They are used in representing whitespace characters like tabs ( "\t" ), newlines ( "\n" ), and carriage returns ( "\r" ).

Prefixing a special character with "\" turns it into an ordinary character.

---

You can avoid the trouble altogether by simply using forward slashes.