Telling Python To Save A .txt File To A Certain Directory On Windows And Mac

How do you tell Python where to save a text file? For example, my computer is running the Python file off my desktop. I want it to save all the text file in my documents folder, no

Solution 1:

Just use an absolute path when opening the filehandle for writing.

import os.path

save_path = 'C:/example/'

name_of_file = raw_input("What is the name of the file: ")

completeName = os.path.join(save_path, name_of_file+".txt")         

file1 = open(completeName, "w")

toFile = raw_input("Write what you want into the field")

file1.write(toFile)

file1.close()

You could optionally combine this with os.path.abspath() as described in Bryan's answer to automatically get the path of a user's Documents folder. Cheers!

Solution 2:

Use os.path.join to combine the path to the Documents directory with the completeName (filename?) supplied by the user.

import os
with open(os.path.join('/path/to/Documents',completeName), "w") as file1:
    toFile = raw_input("Write what you want into the field")
    file1.write(toFile)

If you want the Documents directory to be relative to the user's home directory, you could use something like:

os.path.join(os.path.expanduser('~'),'Documents',completeName)

---

Others have proposed using os.path.abspath. Note that os.path.abspath does not resolve '~' to the user's home directory:

In [10]: cd /tmp
/tmp

In [11]: os.path.abspath("~")
Out[11]: '/tmp/~'

Solution 3:

A small update to this. raw_input() is renamed as input() in Python 3.

Python 3 release note

Solution 4:

Another simple way without using import OS is,

outFileName="F:\\folder\\folder\\filename.txt"
outFile=open(outFileName, "w")
outFile.write("""Hello my name is ABCD""")
outFile.close()

Solution 5:

If you want to save a file to a particular DIRECTORY and FILENAME here is some simple example. It also checks to see if the directory has or has not been created.

import os.path
directory = './html/'
filename = "file.html"
file_path = os.path.join(directory, filename)
ifnotos.path.isdir(directory):
    os.mkdir(directory)
file = open(file_path, "w")
file.write(html)
file.close()

Hope this helps you!