Reading a CSV file without the full name

Question

Very new to Python here. I am trying to read a file from a folder, but without knowing its full name. For example AAA_05212021.csv is the file name located in C:\test\ AAA is the known part of the file name. The rest changes everyday.

I tried:

import pandas as pd
data = pd.read_csv(r'C:\test\AAA*.csv')

.. but it doesn't seem to work. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use glob for this. Glob will return a list of files that match the pattern. Since, there is only one file that matches the pattern in the directory, you can get it with the index 0 :

from glob import glob
import pandas as pd

file = glob('C:\test\AAA*.csv')[0]
data = pd.read_csv(file)

Answer 2

This code should identify all of the possible files it could be:

import os

valid_files = []
for file in os.listdir('C:\test'):
    # Check that "AAA" is in the filename
    if "AAA" in file: 
        # Check that "AAA" is at the start of the filename
        if file.partition("AAA")[0] == "":
            valid_files.append(file)

Of course, if there are multiple files in the folder that follow that structure, you'll still need to pick one somehow, but that could be as simple as files[0] if you aren't picky.