How to read all .txt files from a directory

Question

I would like to read all the contents from all the text files in a directory. I have 4 text files in the "path" directory, and my codes are;

for filename in os.listdir(path):
    filepath = os.path.join(path, filename)
    with open(filepath, mode='r') as f:
        content = f.read()
        thelist = content.splitlines()
        f.close()
        print(filepath)
        print(content)
        print()

When I run the codes, I can only read the contents from only one text file.

I will be thankful that there are any advice or suggestions from you or that you know any other informative inquiries for this question in stackoverflow.

Side note: no need for an explicit `f.close()` inside a `with open(...) as f:` block. — 9769953, Sep 09 '21 at 13:10
When you run it does the print statement print something for all four? or is it just only saving one of them — Hippolippo, Sep 09 '21 at 13:13

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Sep 11 '21 at 17:25

Basically, if you want to read all the files, you need to save them somehow. In your example, you are overriding thelist with content.splitlines() which deletes everything already in it. Instead you should define thelist outside of the loop and use thelist.append(content.splitlines) each time, which adds the content to the list each iteration

Then you can iterate over thelist later and get the data out.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 09 '21 at 13:16

This should list your file and you can read them one by one. All the lines of the files are stored in all_lines list. If you wish to store the content too, you can keep append it too

from pathlib import Path
from os import listdir
from os.path import isfile, join

path = "path_to_dir"
only_files = [f for f in listdir(path) if isfile(join(path, f))]
all_lines = []
for file_name in only_files:
    file_path = Path(path) / file_name
    with open(file_path, 'r') as f:
        file_content = f.read()
        all_lines.append(file_content.splitlines())
        print(file_content)

# use all_lines

Note: when using with you do not need to call close() explicitly

Reference: How do I list all files of a directory?

i appreciate your help and suggestion. thank you so much :) – vdu16 Sep 09 '21 at 13:36 — vdu16, Sep 09 '21 at 13:36

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 09 '21 at 13:24

If you need to filter the files' name per suffix, i.e. file extension, you can either use the string method endswith or the glob module of the standard library https://docs.python.org/3/library/glob.html Here an example of code which save each file content as a string in a list.

import os

path = '.' # or your path

files_content = []

for filename in filter(lambda p: p.endswith("txt"), os.listdir(path)):
    filepath = os.path.join(path, filename)
    with open(filepath, mode='r') as f:
        files_content += [f.read()]

With the glob way here an example

import glob

for filename in glob.glob('*txt'):
    print(filename)

thank you very much. it helped me understand which part was missing. thanks again. — vdu16, Sep 09 '21 at 13:34

How to read all .txt files from a directory

3 Answers3