Question

I am trying to write some code that searches a group of files for a string and then places any files that include the string into a different directory which at the start of the program will not exist.

import os
import re

def test():
    os.chdir("C:/Users/David/Files/TestFiles")
    files = os.listdir(".")
    os.mkdir("C:/Users/David/Files/TestFiles2")
    for x in (files):
        inputFile = open((x), "r")
        content = inputFile.read()
        inputFile.close()
        if "Hello Word" in content:
            with open ("C:/Users/David/Files/TestFiles2", "w") as outputFile:
                outputFile.write(content)

When it runs I get the following error message

PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'C:/Users/David/Files/TestFiles2'

Just wondering if anyone can tell me why this error message appears.

Answer 1

You cannot open a directory for writing:

os.mkdir("C:/Users/David/Files/TestFiles2")

followed by

open("C:/Users/David/Files/TestFiles2", "w")

won’t work. Did you mean to add a filename to the latter statement?

If that was to be based on the x filename, you should add that name to the path:

with open(os.path.join("C:/Users/David/Files/TestFiles2", os.path.basename(x)), 'w') as outputFile:

To move the file, use shutil.move() instead; no need to ‘open’ the directory for that:

if "facebook.com" in content.lower():
     shutil.move(x, "C:/Users/David/Files/TestFiles2")

Complete code, simplified:

def test():
    src = "C:/Users/David/Files/TestFiles"
    dst = "C:/Users/David/Files/TestFiles2"
    os.mkdir(dst)
    for filename in os.listdir(src):
        path = os.path.join(src, filename)
        with open(path, "r") as inputFile:
            content = inputFile.read()
        if "facebook.com" in content.lower():
            shutil.move(path, dst)