I want to add a path to my data directory in python, so that I can read/write files from that directory without including the path to it all the time.

For example I have my working directory at /user/working where I am currently working in the file /user/working/foo.py. I also have all of my data in the directory /user/data where I want to excess the file /user/data/important_data.csv.

In foo.py, I could now just read the csv with pandas using

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('../data/important_data.csv')

which totally works. I just want to know if there is a way to include /user/data as a main path for the file so I can just read the file with

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('important_data.csv')

The only idea I had was adding the path via sys.path.append('/user/data'), which didnt work (I guess it only works for importing modules).

Is anyone able to provide any ideas if this is possible?

PS: My real problem is of course more complex, but this minimal example should be enough to handle my problem.

CodePudding user response：

It looks like you can use os.chdir for this purpose.

import os

os.chdir('/user/data')

See https://note.nkmk.me/en/python-os-getcwd-chdir/ for more details.

CodePudding user response：

If you are keeping everything in /user/data, why not use f-strings to make this easy? You could assign the directory to a variable in a cofig and then use it in the string like so:

In a config somewhere:

data_path = "/user/data"

Reading later...

df = pd.read_csv(f"{data_path}/important_data.csv")