Member Avatar for tony75

Hi
I have a folder and its contain 5 text files.
My question is
How can I navigate to folder and read two first line of the txt files in folder with python scripts?

I will be very greatful for your help.

Reagards
Tony

  • 4 Contributors
  • 5 Replies
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  • 20 Hours Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by TrustyTony

Dani AI

Generated

A concise, modern, memory-efficient Python 3 pattern for the original question from : read the first two lines of every .txt file in a folder, print a filename header, and handle common pitfalls (encoding, missing lines, permission errors). This complements the answers from and by avoiding loading whole files into memory and by adding clearer file-level reporting.

from pathlib import Path
from itertools import islice

DIR = Path(r"C:\path\to\the\dir")  # use Path('.') for current directory

for path in sorted(DIR.glob("*.txt")):
    if not path.is_file():
        continue
    print(f"--- {path.name} ---")
    try:
        with path.open("r", encoding="utf-8", errors="replace") as fh:
            for line in islice(fh, 2):
                print(line.rstrip("\r\n"))
    except OSError as exc:
        print(f"(could not open {path.name}: {exc})")

Why this approach:

  • islice(fh, 2) reads only the first two lines without loading the whole file into memory (safer for large files).
  • path.open(..., errors="replace") avoids crashes on unexpected byte sequences; change the encoding if files use a legacy Windows code page.
  • sorted(...) makes file processing deterministic; replace the key with p.stat().st_mtime to sort by modification time.
  • Use DIR.rglob("*.txt") for recursive searches.

Troubleshooting notes:

  • Files with fewer than two lines will print whatever exists; no exception is raised.
  • Permission errors or locked files surface as OSError and are handled above.
  • For environments still on Python 2 (EOL since 2020), use codecs.open() or upgrade to Python 3 for better Unicode handling.

This solution keeps the clarity of 's filename-aware output while improving memory behavior compared with the one-liner shown by .

Recommended Answers

All 5 Replies

Member Avatar for TrustyTony

What how have you tried to do it?

Post your code and we can see what is your problem

Tony

Edited by TrustyTony because: n/a
Member Avatar for tony75

Reading just two first line on the each text files in the folder.

Member Avatar for jice 
import glob
print "\n\n".join(["".join([l for l in open(inf).readlines()[:2]]) for inf in glob.glob("C:\\path\\to\\the\\dir\\*.txt")])
Edited by jice because: n/a
Member Avatar for TrustyTony

Ok, another alternative solution:

from __future__ import print_function

import os


PATH = os.curdir
EXTENSIONS = '.TXT','.ME','1ST'

for filename in (inf for inf in os.listdir(PATH) 
                  if inf.upper().endswith(EXTENSIONS)):
     with open(filename) as textfile:
          try:
              print(next(textfile), next(textfile))
              print('-'*40)
          except StopIteration:
                 continue
Edited by TrustyTony because: n/a
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