Find all files in a directory with a given extension using Python
David Y.
The Problem
Using Python, how can I find all the files in a directory that have a certain extension, e.g. .txt?
The Solution
There are two ways to do this, depending on whether or not we want to search through subdirectories. To get all the files with a given file extension in the current directory, ignoring subdirectories, we can use glob.glob():
import glob, os os.chdir("/directory_to_search") # move to the search directory txt_files = [f for f in glob.glob("*.txt")] # will produce a list of .txt files
If we want to search subdirectories as well, we must use os.walk(). This function returns a generator iterator that can be used in a for loop to methodically traverse a filesystem tree, starting at a given path. For each level of the tree, os.walk() will return a three-value tuple, containing:
- The name of the current directory.
- A list of subdirectory names in the current directory.
- A list of file names in the current directory.
By looping through the output of os.walk(), we can check each file within the top-level subdirectory and add it to our list if it ends in .txt:
import os txt_files = [] for root, dirs, files in os.walk("/directory_to_search"): for file in files: if file.endswith(".txt"): txt_files.append(os.path.join(root, file))
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