Question

I’d like to get a path to an arbitrary text file (with .txt suffix) which is present somewhere in the directory tree. The file should not be hidden or in hidden directory.

I tried to write the code but it looks little cumbersome. How would you improve it to avoid useless steps?

def getSomeTextFile(rootDir):
  """Get the path to arbitrary text file under the rootDir"""
  for root, dirs, files in os.walk(rootDir):
    for f in files:
      path = os.path.join(root, f)                                        
      ext = path.split(".")[-1]
      if ext.lower() == "txt":
        # it shouldn't be hidden or in hidden directory
        if not "/." in path:
          return path               
  return "" # there isn't any text file

Answer 1

I’d use fnmatch instead of string manipulations.

import os, os.path, fnmatch

def find_files(root, pattern, exclude_hidden=True):
    """ Get the path to arbitrary .ext file under the root dir """
    for dir, _, files in os.walk(root):
        for f in fnmatch.filter(files, pattern):
            path = os.path.join(dir, f)
            if '/.' not in path or not exclude_hidden:
                yield path

I’ve also rewritten the function to be more generic (and “pythonic”). To get just one pathname, call it like this:

 first_txt = next(find_files(some_dir, '*.txt'))