How to check if File or Directory Exists in Python

It is important to first check if the file or directory exists before trying to perform operations on it.

This is because you will get an error if the file or directory doesn't exist on the file system.

In this post, we'll learn about how to check if a file or directory exists using Python.

Checking if a file or directory exists

Thankfully, Python makes checking this easy for us.

Simply import the os module which comes built-in to Python so we can have access to the os.path.exists() function.

This function takes in a string representing the path of the file or directory you want to check.

The function will then return a bool value representing whether or not the file or directory exists.

If it returns True, then the file or directory exists, if not, then it will return False.

Let's see how to use it:

PYTHON
import os

path = 'text.txt'

exists = os.path.exists(path)

print(exists)

BASH
False

Remember that this function supports both files and directories.

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to check if a file or directory exists in Python.

Simply use the os.path.exists() function in the os module to check a path.

Thanks for reading and happy coding!

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