Python Novice Question - Get a list of files in a directory with particular extension

[SheriNorton]

I need to generate a list of all files in a directory with a *.MDB extension (personal geodatabases) in a Python script. Should I first split the path and filenames:

dirname = "C:\Arcwork"
(filepath, filename) = os.path.split(dirname)

and then somehow split the filename into name and extension (how?!), or vice versa?

[Luke_Pinner]

Both code snippets will work on Windows and unix/linux, but the top one will only return *.mdb (not *.MDB/*.MdB/etc...) on unix/linux as those OSs have case-sensitive file systems (generally speaking, as there are case-insensitive types of filesystems for linux and you can enable case-sensivity for certain Windows filesystems).

[TedCronin]

There is also a new List at ArcGIS 10 called ListFiles, arcpy.ListFiles ("*.mdb").

[DanielSmith]

i like using:

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(r'your root directory'):

that way you can access directories and files independently.

[NiklasNorrthon]

Here are two more ways to do this:

import os
personal_gdbs = [file for file in os.listdir('c:/Arcwork' if file.lower().endswith('.mdb')]


or


import arcpy
arcpy.env.workspace = 'c:/Arcwork'
personal_gdbs = arcpy.ListWorkspaces('*.mdb')

[HugoAhlenius]

import os
personal_gdbs = [file for file in os.listdir('c:/Arcwork') if file.lower().endswith('.mdb')]

To me, this looks like cleanest!
(I corrected a paranthesis in the snippet)

[TedCronin]

This is a great thread.