Python concatenate text files

Question

I have a list of 20 file names, like ['file1.txt', 'file2.txt', ...]. I want to write a Python script to concatenate these files into a new file. I could open each file by f = open(...), read line by line by calling f.readline(), and write each line into that new file. It doesn't seem very "elegant" to me, especially the part where I have to read//write line by line.

Is there a more "elegant" way to do this in Python?

Answer 1

What's wrong with UNIX commands ? (given you're not working on Windows) :

ls | xargs cat | tee output.txt does the job ( you can call it from python with subprocess if you want)

Answer 2

Check out the .read() method of the File object:

http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/inputoutput.html#methods-of-file-objects

You could do something like:

concat = ""
for file in files:
    concat += open(file).read()

or a more 'elegant' python-way:

concat = ''.join([open(f).read() for f in files])

which, according to this article: http://www.skymind.com/~ocrow/python_string/ would also be the fastest.

Answer 3

Use shutil.copyfileobj. It should be more efficient.

with open('output_file.txt','wb') as wfd:
    for f in ['seg1.txt','seg2.txt','seg3.txt']:
        with open(f,'rb') as fd:
            shutil.copyfileobj(fd, wfd, 1024*1024*10)
            #10MB per writing chunk to avoid reading big file into memory.

Answer 4

An alternative to @inspectorG4dget answer (best answer to date 29-03-2016). I tested with 3 files of 436MB.

@inspectorG4dget solution: 162 seconds

The following solution : 125 seconds

from subprocess import Popen
filenames = ['file1.txt', 'file2.txt', 'file3.txt']
fbatch = open('batch.bat','w')
str ="type "
for f in filenames:
    str+= f + " "
fbatch.write(str + " > file4results.txt")
fbatch.close()
p = Popen("batch.bat", cwd=r"Drive:\Path\to\folder")
stdout, stderr = p.communicate()

The idea is to create a batch file and execute it, taking advantage of "old good technology". Its semi-python but works faster. Works for windows.

Answer 5

If you have a lot of files in the directory then glob2 might be a better option to generate a list of filenames rather than writing them by hand.

import glob2

filenames = glob2.glob('*.txt')  # list of all .txt files in the directory

with open('outfile.txt', 'w') as f:
    for file in filenames:
        with open(file) as infile:
            f.write(infile.read()+'\n')