Re-Naming Files as they are being opened in Python For Loop

Question

I'm trying to create a program that will read in multiple .txt files and rename them in one go. I'm able to read them in, but I'm falling flat when it comes to defining them all.

First I tried including an 'as' statement after the open call in my loop, but the files kept overwriting each other since it's only one name I'm defining. I was thinking I could read them in as 'file1', 'file2', 'file3'... etc

Any idea on how I can get this naming step to work in a for loop?

import os
os.chdir("\\My Directory")

#User Inputs: 
num_files = 3 

#Here, users' actual file names in their directory would be 'A.txt', 
'B.txt', 'C.txt'
filenames = [A, B, C]

j = 1
for i in filenames:
   while j in range(1,num_files):
      open(i + ".txt", 'r').read().split() as file[j]
      j =+ 1

I was hoping that each time it read in the file, it would define each one as file#. Clearly, my syntax is wrong because of the way I'm indexing 'file'. I've tried using another for loop in the for loop, but that gave me a syntax error as well. I'm really new to python and programming logic in general. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thank you!

Possible duplicate of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37467561/renaming-multiple-files-in-a-directory-using-python — Sumit S Chawla, Feb 04 '19 at 04:57

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 04 '19 at 05:51

You should probably use the rename() function in the os module. An example could be:

import os
os.rename("stackoverflow.html", "xyz.html")

stack overflow.html would be the name you want to call the file and xyz.html would be the current name of the file/the destination of the file. Hope this helps!

Re-Naming Files as they are being opened in Python For Loop

1 Answers1