Files, Folders & OS (Need) Exercises

Exercise 1 (Tidying a collaboration) ☻

You are a member of an international team analysing environmental pollution. The project involves ten cities: Cairo, Dhaka, Jakarta, Karachi, Manila, Melbourne, Osaka, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Your task is to process and organise data from various environmental measurements. The provided zip file, os-collaboration-exercise-data.zip, contains all relevant data files for the past year.

Things to note

  1. Data Files: Each data file is named in the format month-date_city.txt (e.g., may-10_singapore.txt).
  2. Data Collection: Data was recorded sporadically; not all days of each month have corresponding data files. The dates of data collection vary across the cities.
  3. Exclusion of Files: Ignore any non-text files, such as those in .pdf, .png, or .jpg formats.

  • We like to convert the filename to a more useful numerical format. Specifically, we want to convert month-date-city.txt. (i.e. may-10-singapore.txt) to a mm-dd-city.txt (i.e. 05-10-singapore.txt) format.

  • Using the following dictionary (or otherwise), write a snippet of Python code to convert 'oct-08_singapore.txt' to 10-08-singapore.txt.

    {
'jan': '01', 'feb': '02', 'mar': '03',
'apr': '04', 'may': '05', 'jun': '06',
'jul': '07', 'aug': '08', 'sep': '09',
'oct': '10', 'nov': '11', 'dec': '12'
}
  • Incorporate your previous code into a function named rename_my_file(old_file_name) that accepts the old filename as the argument and returns the new file name.

  • Use a for loop to apply the function rename_my_file() to the file list below.

    ['oct-08_singapore.txt', 'jul-10_cairo.txt', 'may-15_dhaka.txt',
 'may-13_cairo.txt', 'oct-21_cairo.txt', 'jan-10_singapore.txt',
 'jun-20_tokyo.txt', 'aug-06_jakarta.txt', 'dec-21_karachi.txt',
 'jan-01_tokyo.txt']

  • Print out your progress in the form old-file-name ----> new-file-name

  • With the help of glob, use rename_my_file() to rename all the .txt files in the folder.

  • Note that you might have to adjust your function rename_my_file() to accommodate the already renamed files.

  • Use a for loop to create a folder for each city.
    The list of cities is provided below for your convenience.

    ['Cairo', 'Dhaka', 'Jakarta', 'Karachi', 'Manila',
 'Melbourne', 'Osaka', 'Shanghai', 'Singapore', 'Tokyo']
  • Use glob to list all the files from Cairo.
  • Now use a for loop and shutil.copy() to copy all the files related to Cairo to the corresponding folder you created.
  • Tweak your code to move all the files to the corresponding folders of all the cities.
Back to top