How to import files from specific directory, not using os.path in Python

Question

So far my code is this :

from glob import glob
shakedir='D:\report\shakeall'
from shakedir import isfile
def countwords(fp):
   with open(fp) as fh:
       return len(fh.read().split())
print "There are" ,sum(map(countwords, filter(isfile, glob("*.txt") ) ) ), "words in the files."

The problem is this code doesn't work :)

I'm not used to Python grammar, so I just tried anything.

What I want is, I want this script to import text files from specific directory.

Not from the os.path , where my .py file is.

I want to import from D:\\report\\shakeall and I can't. That's it.

Thanks for any advice.

Answer 1

You can also use glob function alone for this purpose:

from glob import glob

pattern = "D:\\report\\shakeall\\*.txt"
filelist = glob(pattern)

and then do whatever you want on that filelist. Your way should work now:

def countwords(fp):
    with open(fp) as fh:
        return len(fh.read().split())

print "There are" ,sum(map(countwords, filelist))), "words in the files."

Answer 2

You can use os.walk("pathname") to get a list of files in a certain directory. http://docs.python.org/library/os#os.walk

Answer 3

backslashes signify an escape in a string literal. Try either

"d:/report/shakeall"

Or

"d:\\report\\shakeall"

Ideally:

os.path.join("d:", "report/", "shakeall")

Answer 4

If I understand your question correctly, what you need is:

shakedir = "d:\\report\\shakeall"
..
print "There are" ,sum(map(countwords, filter(isfile, glob(shakedir + "\\*.txt"))))), ".."
                                                           ^^^^^ It can take directories too..

The line:

from shakedir import isfile

does not make any sense to me. And provide an implementation for isfile, or use the one from os module.