Python: get path to file in sister directory?

Question

I have a file structure like this:

data
   mydata.xls
scripts
   myscript.py

From within myscript.py, how can I get the filepath of mydata.

Answer 1

From you comments, it seems that book = xlrd.open_workbook(filename) doesn't like relative path. You can create a path relative to the current file __file__ and then take the absolute path that will remove the relative portions (..)

import os

filename = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), '../data/mydata.xls')
book = xlrd.open_workbook(os.path.abspath(filename))