How to Delete a File if It Exists in Python

file-iopythontry-catch

I want to create a file; if it already exists I want to delete it and create it anew. I tried doing it like this but it throws a Win32 error. What am I doing wrong?

try:
    with open(os.path.expanduser('~') + '\Desktop\input.txt'):
        os.remove(os.path.expanduser('~') + '\Desktop\input.txt')
        f1 = open(os.path.expanduser('~') + '\Desktop\input.txt', 'a')
except IOError:
    f1 = open(os.path.expanduser('~') + '\Desktop\input.txt', 'a')

Best Answer

You're trying to delete an open file, and the docs for os.remove() state...

On Windows, attempting to remove a file that is in use causes an exception to be raised

You could change the code to...

filename = os.path.expanduser('~') + '\Desktop\input.txt'
try:
    os.remove(filename)
except OSError:
    pass
f1 = open(filename, 'a')

...or you can replace all that with...

f1 = open(os.path.expanduser('~') + '\Desktop\input.txt', 'w')

...which will truncate the file to zero length before opening.

Related Solutions

Python – Most Pythonic Way to Delete a File if it Doesn’t Exist

A more pythonic way would be:

try:
    os.remove(filename)
except OSError:
    pass

Although this takes even more lines and looks very ugly, it avoids the unnecessary call to os.path.exists() and follows the python convention of overusing exceptions.

It may be worthwhile to write a function to do this for you:

import os, errno

def silentremove(filename):
    try:
        os.remove(filename)
    except OSError as e: # this would be "except OSError, e:" before Python 2.6
        if e.errno != errno.ENOENT: # errno.ENOENT = no such file or directory
            raise # re-raise exception if a different error occurred

Python – How to Handle File Exists Exception

According to the code print ..., it seems like you're using Python 2.x. FileExistsError was added in Python 3.3; You can't use FileExistsError.

Use errno.EEXIST:

import os
import errno

try:
    os.mkdir(folderPath)
except OSError as e:
    if e.errno == errno.EEXIST:
        print('Directory not created.')
    else:
        raise

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Python – Most Pythonic Way to Delete a File if it Doesn’t Exist

Python – How to Handle File Exists Exception

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