python script read in from subscript not finding file in directory even though the os.listdir sees it and subscript works fine on its own

Question

I am reading a python subscript into a python script. The subscript uses an excel file in it's working directory. The structure looks like this

main_folder ->
  main.py
  subfolder ->
   data.xlsx
   submain.py

My main script calls the subscript as such:

from subfolder.submain import df

My submain.py script looks as such:

df = pd.read_excel('data.xlsx')

However on my main.py script I get the following error:

FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'data.xlsx'

This is strange because not only does submain.py run fine by itself, a quick os.listdir() shows the file to be there:

for f in os.listdir('subfolder'):
print(f)

data.xlsx
submain.py

Does anyone understand this behaviour? Many thanks

main.py works in its containing folder, that does not contain data.xslx. Now I'm not sure what's the best way to fix that is. — Swifty, Dec 16 '22 at 10:55
Finally found a post that addresses this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10174211/how-to-make-an-always-relative-to-current-module-file-path — Swifty, Dec 16 '22 at 11:25

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 16 '22 at 11:34

It's a path problem: since submain.py is imported by main.py, your file is looked for in the working directory, main_folder; to fix that, add the absolute path to your pd.read_excel statement in submain.py:

import os
df = pd.read_excel(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'data.xlsx'))

python script read in from subscript not finding file in directory even though the os.listdir sees it and subscript works fine on its own

1 Answers1