Question

I have a directory named main that contains two files: a text file named alex.txt that only has 100 as its contents, and another file named mark.txt that has 400.

I want to create a function that will go into the directory, and take every file name and that file’s contents and store them (into a dict?). So the end result would look something like this:

({'alex.txt', '100'}, {'mark.txt', '400'})

What would be the best way of doing this for large amounts of files?

Answer 1

This looks like a good job for os.walk

d = {}
for path,dirs,fnames in os.walk(top):
    for fname in fnames:
        visit = os.path.join(path,fname)
        with open(visit) as f:
             d[visit] = f.read()

This solution will also recurse into subdirectories if they are present.