Question

Here’s the code first

    user = os.path.expanduser('~\AppData\Local\Temp')
    os.path.exists(user,'\whatever.txt')

Now the problem is, when I run it it says:

Traceback (most recent call last):

File “pyshell#7”, line 1, in module
os.path.exists(user,’\whatever.txt’)

TypeError: exists() takes exactly 1
argument (2 given)

How do I fix the problem?

Answer 1

Use os.path.join to join two path fragments together:

os.path.exists(os.path.join(user,'whatever.txt'))

Note that r'\whatever.txt' is an absolute path, so
os.path.join(user,r'\whatever.txt') would return r'\whatever.txt', ignoring the value of user.

If you want to look for whatever.txt inside the user directory, then you need to use a relative path by removing the backslash.

PS: Python assigns special meaning to certain characters preceded by backslashes. '\t' is a tab character for example. You generally don’t intend for backslashes to be interpreted in this way in a path, so — even though all the backslashes in your post are interpreted literally — it is generally a good idea to get in the habit of using raw strings (e.g. r'~\AppData\Local\Temp' to specify paths so you don’t get unexpected surprises later. Or, you could use forward slashes instead: '~/AppData/Local/Temp'.