How do I download this file to a folder with the current day's date stamp?

Question

I have the below code which downloads a sheet to a folder on my computer. How do I have it download the excel sheet to a newly created folder with the current day's datestamp? So for example, I want the file to download to a folder called:

C:/Users/E29853/OneDrive/Smartsheets/Templates/20220610/

for any files downloaded on June 10, 2022.

This is the code I have:

import os, smartsheet

token=os.environ['SMARTSHEET_ACCESS_TOKEN']

smartsheet_client = smartsheet.Smartsheet(token)

smartsheet_client.errors_as_exceptions(True)

smartsheet_client.Sheets.get_sheet_as_excel(
  8729488427892475,
  'C:/Users/E29853/OneDrive/Smartsheets/Templates',
  'Region.xlsx'
)

Answer 1

In order to augment your existing code to achieve your stated objective, you need to know how to achieve the following two things with Python:

1. how to get the current date (string) in yyyymmdd format
2. how to create a new directory if it doesn't already exist

I'm fairly new to Python myself, but was able to figure this out thanks to Google. In case it's helpful for you in the future, here was my process for figuring this out.

Step 1: Determine how to get the current date (yyyymmdd) in Python

• Google search for python get current date yyyymmdd
• The top search result was a Stack Overflow answer with > 1000 upvotes (which indicates a broadly approved answer that should be reliable).
• Note that the date format was slightly different in this question/answer (yyyy-mm-dd) -- I omitted the hyphens in my code, to get the desired format yyyymmdd.

Now that I know how to get the date string in the desired format, I'll be able to concatenate it with the string that represents my base path, to get my target path:

# specify path
path = 'c:/users/kbrandl/desktop/' + current_date

Step 2: Determine how to create a directory (if it doesn't already exist) in Python

• Google search for python create folder if not exists
• Once again, the top search result provided the sample code I was looking for.

With this info, I now know how to create my target directory (folder) if it doesn't yet exist:

# create directory if it doesn't exist
if not os.path.exists(path):
    os.mkdir(path)

---

Putting this all together now...the following code achieves your stated objective.

import os, smartsheet
from datetime import datetime

sheetId = 3932034054809476

# get current date in yyyymmdd format
current_date = datetime.today().strftime('%Y%m%d')

# specify path
path = 'c:/users/kbrandl/desktop/' + current_date

# create directory if it doesn't exist
if not os.path.exists(path):
    os.mkdir(path)

# download file to specified path
smartsheet_client.Sheets.get_sheet_as_excel(
    sheetId,
    path,
    'MyFileName.xlsx'
)