Parsing the results of askopenfilenames()?

Question

I\'m trying to get a list of filenames from tkinter.filedialog.askopenfilenames() in Python 3.2.

    files = askopenfilenames(initialdir=\"C:\\\\Users\\\\BVC         


        

Answer 1

I support Eldererathis's answer as the best solution I have found for Python versions 2.X (mainly 2.5 and above) versions under Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. When a tkFileDialog calls the askopenfilename(...,multiple=1) methods with argument multiple=1, I could not get it work properly under Windows (Linux and Mac OS X were fine) when a single file was selected (the file is processed as a 'str' instead of a 'tuple').

I tried the files = re.findall('\{(.*?)\}', files suggested by Paul in the comments, but it did not change anything. I also tried files = tuple(files) and files = list(files), but it is not a viable workaround from what I have seen.

So far, files = tkRoot.master.splitlist(files) is what is working under all environments I have tested (Win32, Win64, Linux32, Linux64, Mac OS X).

Answer 2

I don't have an exact answer for you, because I'm still stuck in Python 2.x, but in my world askopenfilenames returns a tuple, so I doubt it would have changed so much going to 3.x. Maybe try casting as a list:

filelist = list(files)

Or using a list comprehension by iterating over it:

filelist = [file for file in files]

Answer 3

I just found this question when looking up why I was getting curly brackets instead of a proper list.

Here's my work around:

file_list=[]
files = files = askopenfilenames(initialdir="C:\\Users\\BVCAP\\Videos", title="Select files")
for file in files:
    file_list.append(file)

I noticed that when I was using the askopenfilenames in my method I never looked at the object returned. I had treated it as a tuple and it worked fine. So knowing it could be iterated in a for loop, it made sense to append each item into a new blank list.

I hope this helps anyone else who encounters this bug.

Answer 4

This is actually a bug on the Windows version that has been present since around the 2.6 release of Python. You can find the issue on their tracker, and there's a workaround in the comments (I have not personally tried this workaround because I'm on Linux, which returns a proper tuple). I'm not aware of a fix since then, and the issue has not been marked as closed/resolved.

The suggested workaround in the comment is essentially to do this:

master = Tk()
files = askopenfilenames(initialdir="C:\\Users\\BVCAP\\Videos", title="Select files")
files = master.tk.splitlist(files) #Possible workaround
self.num_files.set(len(files))