How To Check If A Python File Exists In Directory Or Subdirectory

This post will explain python file exists. When writing Python scripts, you might want to carry out a particular action only if a file or directory exists or not. For example, you may wish to check out or compose information to a setup file or to create the file only if it currently doesn’t exist.

How To Check If A Python File Exists In Directory Or Subdirectory

In this article, you can know about python file exists here are the details below;

In Python, there are various ways to inspect whether a file exists and figure out the kind of the file.
This tutorial reveals 3 various methods about how to check for a file’s existence.

Check if File Exists

The easiest way to inspect whether a file exists is to attempt to open the file. This technique does not need importing any module and deals with both Python 2 and 3. Utilize this approach if you wish to open the data & make some action. Also check best Programming languages.

The following snippet is using a pure try-except block. We are working to open the file filename.txt, & if the data does not exist, an IOError exception is raised and “Submit not available” message is printed:

try:
    f = open("filename.txt")
    # Do something with the file
except IOError:
    print("File not accessible")
finally:
    f.close()

If you are doing Python 3, you can likewise utilize FileNotFoundError instead of IOError exception.
When opening files, it is suggested to use the with keyword, which makes sure the data is correctly closed after the file operations are finished, even if an exception is raised during the operation. It also makes your code shorter due to the fact that you do not require to close the file using the close function.
The following code is comparable to the previous example:

try:
    with open('/etc/hosts') as f:
        print(f.readlines())
        # Do something with the file
except IOError:
    print("File not accessible")

In the examples above, we were utilizing the try-except block and opening the file to prevent the race condition. Race conditions occur when you have more than one process accessing the very same file.
For instance, when you inspect the existence of a file another process might develop, delete, or block the file in the timeframe in between the check and the file opening. This may cause your code to break.

Check if File Exists utilizing the os.path Module

The os.path module supplies some useful functions for working with pathnames. The module is readily prepared for both Python 2 & 3.
In the context of this tutorial, the very crucial functions are:

– os.path.exists( path) – Returns true if the course is a file, directory site, or a valid symlink.
– os.path.isfile( course) – Returns true if the path is a regular file or a symlink to a file.
– os.path.isdir( course) – Returns true if the path is a directory or a symlink to a directory site.
The following if statement indicates whether the data filename.txt exist:

import os.path

if os.path.isfile('filename.txt'):
    print ("File exist")
else:
    print ("File not exist")

Use this technique when you require to inspect whether the file exists or not prior to performing an action on the file. For example copying or deleting a file.
If you want to open and customize the file prefer to use the previous method. Also check mysql vs sql.

Check if File Exists using the pathlib Module

The pathlib module is available in Python 3.4 and above. This module offers an object-oriented interface for working with filesystem courses for various os.
Like with the previous example the following code checks whether the file filename.txt exist:

from pathlib import Path

if Path('filename.txt').is_file():
    print ("File exist")
else:
    print ("File not exist")

The primary difference between pathlib and os.path is that pathlib allows you to deal with the paths as Course things with appropriate methods and associates instead of normal str things. Also check big data vs data science.
If you want to utilize this module in Python 2 you can install it with pip:

pip install pathlib2

Conclusion

In this guide, we have actually revealed you how to examine if a file or directory exists using Python.