PyInstaller cannot add .txt files

Question

I\'m fairly new with programming (and with Python) and the Stack Overflow question/response system allowed me to resolve all my problems until now. I didn\'t find any post d

Answer 1

After the line

a = Analysis( ... )

add

a.datas += [
    ("/absolute/path/to/some.txt","txt_files/some.txt","DATA"),
    ("/absolute/path/to/some2.txt","txt_files/some2.txt","DATA"),
    ("/absolute/path/to/some3.txt","txt_files/some3.txt","DATA"),
]

Then in your program use the following to get the resource path of your .txt files.

def resource_path(relative_path):
    """ Get absolute path to resource, works for dev and for PyInstaller """
    try:
        # PyInstaller creates a temp folder and stores path in _MEIPASS
        base_path = sys._MEIPASS
    except Exception:
        base_path = os.environ.get("_MEIPASS2",os.path.abspath("."))

    return os.path.join(base_path, relative_path)

 ...


 txt_data = open(resource_path("txt_files/some.txt")).read()

Make sure you build it like python -m PyInstaller my_target.spec ... do not call PyInstaller directly against your .py file after you have edited your specification file or it will overwrite your edited file...