Tag: list all files in a folder

Python: Read all files in a folder

On By Ben Larson Ph.D.In Analytics, excel, PythonLeave a comment

os.listdir() command will easily give you a list off all files in a folder.

So for this exercise I created a folder and threw a few files in it.

Using the following code, can iterate through the file list

import os
for files in os.listdir("C:/Users/blars/Documents/test_folder"):
    print(files)

Now if I wanted to read the files, I could use the Pandas command pd.read_excel to read each file in the loop

***Note, I made this folder with only Excel files on purpose for ease of demonstration. You could do this with multiple file types in a folder, it would however require some conditional logic to handle the different file types

To read all the Excel files in the folder:

import pandas as pd
import os

os.chdir('C:/Users/blars/Documents/test_folder')
for files in os.listdir("C:/Users/blars/Documents/test_folder"):
    print(files)
    file = pd.read_excel(files)
    print(file)