CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonspecial-characters
Ben Smith
Ben Smith

Reputation: 380

Does the "~" character have any special meaning in python 3?

Someone who I took over their position as data analyst has a program that searches for a "bad character" in a filename which they assigned in a variable to "~". This prints out "bad character in filename". It is printing out when checking a folder if a file exists there but I don't understand why. The program just looks for if the filestamp of the file being added was today, doesn't matter the name.

for filename in os.listdir(strSrcName):    # llok through files in the directory of the second row in SQL table, SAT_Report_Status
            mdate = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(os.stat(strSrcName + filename).st_ctime).strftime('%m/%d/%Y')
            jdate =  datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(os.stat(strSrcName + filename).st_ctime).strftime('%Y/%j')
            if filename.find(strFileName) >=0:   # If number of files is 0 or more?
                badchar = "~"   # Not sure what this is for
                if filename[0] in badchar:
                    print("Bad Char found in file name, skipping...")
                else:
                    if mdate == fdate or jdate == juldate:  # if the files timestamp == the current timestamp (now)
                        print(strFileName + " Found! Counting and Moving...")

Does this have any special meaning in Python? I don't even know what it means in general

Upvotes: 0

Views: 75

Answers (1)

r.ook
r.ook

Reputation: 13858

To give a proper answer - "~" doesn't really have a special meaning in Python as it's just a piece of str object. The literal character ~ however is used in binary operation, but is not your concern at the moment.

As mentioned, your script seems to be looking for file names beginning with a ~. This has to do with the OS - in Windows, files beginning with ~ denotes a temporary file, which your script seems to want to ignore (probably because the data is not meaningful to the script).

Upvotes: 1

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