How do I read a csv file in a seperate parent folder?

Question

I have a directory with the following subdirectories

|---Data
|
|---Notebooks

The Data directory contains csv files, while the Notebooks directory contains my Jupyter notebook files. How do I access the file from the Data directory with a notebook at the Notebooks directory?

My initial idea was this:

df = pd.read_csv('../Data/csvFile')

However the code block renders a file not found error in Pandas.

Answer 1

The path you'll need will be relative to the directory you're running the Python process from normally, but you can use the following trick to make it relative to a file you're running instead:

from pathlib import Path

df = pd.read_csv(Path(__file__).parent/'Data'/'csvFile')

However the __file__ variable is not defined in Jupyter notebooks, so you'll have to use this hack instead to get the directory the notebook is in:

from pathlib import Path

df = pd.read_csv(Path(globals()['_dh'][0])/'Data'/'csvFile')

Note that this hack only works when running from Jupyter. Unfortunately I don't have a one-size-fits-all approach, unless you count detecting if you're in Jupyter, and then selecting which method you'll use based off of that.