How to Check if a File Exists in Python

1. try...except to Check the File Existance (>Python 2.x)
2. os.path.isfile() to Check if File Exists (>=Python 2.x)
3. pathlib.Path.is_file() to Check if File Exists (>=Python 3.4)

This tutorial will introduce three different solutions to check whether a file exists in Python.

1. try...except block to check the file existance (>=Python 2.x)
2. os.path.isfile method to check the file existance (>=Python 2.x)
3. pathlib.Path.is_file()check the file existance (>=Python 3.4)

try...except to Check the File Existance (>Python 2.x)

We could try to open the file and could check if file exists or not depending on whether the IOError (in Python 2.x) or FileNotFoundError (in Python 3.x) will be thrown or not.

def checkFileExistance(filePath):
    try:
        with open(filePath, "r") as f:
            return True
    except FileNotFoundError as e:
        return False
    except IOError as e:
        return False

In the above example codes, we make it Python 2/3 compatible by listing both FileNotFoundError and IOError in the exception catching part.

os.path.isfile() to Check if File Exists (>=Python 2.x)

import os

fileName = "temp.txt"
os.path.isfile(fileName)

It checks whether the file fileName exists.

import os

fileName = "temp.txt"
print(os.path.exists(fileName))

fileName = r"C:\Test"
print(os.path.exists(fileName))

pathlib.Path.is_file() to Check if File Exists (>=Python 3.4)

Since Python 3.4, it introduces an object-oriented method in pathlib module to check if a file exists.

from pathlib import Path

fileName = "temp.txt"
fileObj = Path(fileName)
print(fileObj.is_file())

Similarly, it has also is_dir() and exists() methods to check whether a directory or a file/directory exists.