Question

I am writing a program that should read in a number of csv files from a directory and do some analysis on each file. I have these functions:

# Function reads in files and saves data into 2 dimensional array
def ReadInFiles(name):
  try:
    data = []
    fname = csv.reader(open(name, 'r'))
    #print 'read in file: ' + str(fname)
    rowCount = 0
    for row in fname:
      if rowCount != 0: # skip headings
        data.append(row)
      rowCount += 1
      #print name + ' ' + str(row) + ' read in successfully \n'                
  except IOError: "Can't read files"


  return data


#Function reads in files in a folder  
def ReadDirectory (dirName):
  try:
    Data = []        
    for files in os.listdir(dirName):
      print '\n FILE: ' + files
      Data = ReadInFiles(files)
      AnalyzeData(Data, daysElapsed, columns = 4)

  except IOError:
      print 'Directory does not exist!'

  return

The weird thing about it is if I ignore the ReadDirectory function and use just the ReadInFile function, it works perfectly (files are read in without any issues) but once I call ReadInFunction from ReadDirectory, I get the error IOError: [Errno2] File or Directory does not exist: logfile.csv
Using os.listdir to list the files in the directory works perfectly too.

I have the folder containing the csv files as a sub directory in the directory that contains the source code. I noticed that if I place copies of the files in the source code directory as well, my scripts works perfectly but if I remove those copies, I start getting the error again.

I have searched previous posts and tried double slashes, / but nothing works. I have checked the permissions on the folder but it doesn’t help either.

Any help will be appreciated!!

Thank you.

P.S. I am fairly new to python so please excuse my possibly bad code

Answer 1

os.listdir() returns bare file names that do not include the name of the directory the files are in.

You probably meant:

 Data = ReadInFiles(os.path.join(dirName, files))

P.S. Why is files plural when it refers to a single file name?

P.P.S. The following except block doesn’t do anything useful and quietly ignores all errors:

except IOError: "Can't read files"