Iterate through files

Question

I'm trying to adapt someone's code for my (Windows 7) purposes. His is unfortunately UNIX specific. He does

dir_ = pathlib.PosixPath(str(somePathVariable))
os.chdir(str(dir_))
for pth in dir_:        
    # some operations here

Running this, I got (not surprisingly)

NotImplementedError: cannot instantiate 'PosixPath' on your system

I looked into the documentation for pathlib and thought yeah, I should just be able to change PosixPath to Path and I would be fine. Well, then dir_ generates a WindowsPath object. So far, so good. However, I get

TypeError: 'WindowsPath' object is not iterable

pathlib is at version 1.0, what am I missing? The purpose is to iterate through files in the specific directory. Googling this second error gave 0 hits.

Remark: Could not use pathlib as a tag, hence I put it into the title.

Update

I have Python 2.7.3 and pathlib 1.0

Solution 1

I guess you should use Path.iterdir().

for pth in dir_.iterdir():

    #Do your stuff here

Solution 2

Try

for pth in dir_.iterdir():

Related documentation here: https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html#pathlib.Path.iterdir

Solution 3

Use glob module instead, which works same on both platforms:

import glob
for item in glob.glob('/your/path/*')  # use any mask suitable for you
   print item # prints full file path

Solution 4

dir_ = pathlib.Path(str(somePathVariable))
os.chdir(str(dir_))
for pth in dir_:        
    # some operations here

Now your code will work on both platforms. You are specifing de type of path... if you want it to be cross-platform you have to use "Path" not "PosixPath"

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Comments

[Jim Oldfield]

You can use the .glob() method on Path objects; no need to switch back to the legacy functions.

[PaulMcG]

In the past, I found the glob.glob() on Windows returns a list of filenames in lexical order, while on Linux order is not guaranteed. So when I ported code from Win to Linux, I had to sort the results from glob.glob() to have consistent behavior. I don't know if Path.glob is similar, but it is worth checking.

[Paul Rougieux]

for path in Path(".").glob("*.csv"): print(path) keeps only specific file extensions.