How do I create a incrementing filename in Python?

Question

I\'m creating a program that will create a file and save it to the directory with the filename sample.xml. Once the file is saved when i try to run the program again it over

Answer 1

Sequentially checking each file name to find the next available one works fine with small numbers of files, but quickly becomes slower as the number of files increases.

Here is a version that finds the next available file name in log(n) time:

import os

def next_path(path_pattern):
    """
    Finds the next free path in an sequentially named list of files

    e.g. path_pattern = 'file-%s.txt':

    file-1.txt
    file-2.txt
    file-3.txt

    Runs in log(n) time where n is the number of existing files in sequence
    """
    i = 1

    # First do an exponential search
    while os.path.exists(path_pattern % i):
        i = i * 2

    # Result lies somewhere in the interval (i/2..i]
    # We call this interval (a..b] and narrow it down until a + 1 = b
    a, b = (i // 2, i)
    while a + 1 < b:
        c = (a + b) // 2 # interval midpoint
        a, b = (c, b) if os.path.exists(path_pattern % c) else (a, c)

    return path_pattern % b

To measure the speed improvement I wrote a small test function that creates 10,000 files:

for i in range(1,10000):
    with open(next_path('file-%s.foo'), 'w'):
        pass

And implemented the naive approach:

def next_path_naive(path_pattern):
    """
    Naive (slow) version of next_path
    """
    i = 1
    while os.path.exists(path_pattern % i):
        i += 1
    return path_pattern % i

And here are the results:

Fast version:

real    0m2.132s
user    0m0.773s
sys 0m1.312s

Naive version:

real    2m36.480s
user    1m12.671s
sys 1m22.425s

Finally, note that either approach is susceptible to race conditions if multiple actors are trying to create files in the sequence at the same time.