CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-2.7
user3527975
user3527975

Reputation: 1773

Fastest way to search for a list of files in directory

Given a list of file names, I want to create the full path for these files if they exist in a given directory or it's sub-directories. Right now I use this code

def construct_path(file_list, directory):
    file_path_list = []
    for name in file_list:
        for dir, subdir, filenames in os.walk(directory):
            if name in filenames:
                file_path_list.append(os.path.join(dir, name))

    return file_path_list

So here the directory is being crawled for each file in the list. Is there a faster/better way to do it?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2464

Answers (1)

Alex
Alex

Reputation: 21766

You can remove the loop over the file_list and remove found files from this list, so you can return the results once you have found all your files:

def construct_path(file_list, directory):
    file_path_list = []
    for dir, subdir, files in os.walk(directory):
        for name in files:
            if name in file_list:
                file_path_list.append(os.path.join(dir, name))
                file_list.remove(name)
            if (len(file_list)==0): return file_path_list
    return file_path_list

Upvotes: 2

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