Put all files in a directory into list. How?

[Denial]

Hello

I want to put all files recursively in a directory into a list with only certain type of extensions.

Here is what I did.

#!/usr/bin/env python3                                                           
                                                                                    
from glob import glob                                                               
                                                                                 
EXTN = ('*.avi', '*.flv', '*.mkv', '*.mov', '*.mp4',                             
        '*.mpeg', '*.mpg', '*.webm', '*.wmv')                                    
                                                                                 
video_files = []                                                                 
                                                                                 
for file in EXTN:                                                                
    video_files.extend(glob("**/*" + file, recursive = True))                    
                                                                                 
video_files.sort()

I'm using Python 3.8.5. Is this the proper way? Or there any best method I can use to store all files with a particular type of extensions in a list?

Thanks

[bowlofred]

You can't pass a list of extensions to glob directly. So your choices are to run multiple globs and combine the results, or to return all the files and then throw out anything that doesn't match one of your extensions. For short trees where running the glob doesn't take long, the first one isn't bad. But if you have billions of files, it would be very inefficient.

[Larz60+]

this can be done with pathlib:

I use same path as script file, but you can substitute any path on line 23
note that I removed the '*' from EXTN pathlib wants just the suffix.
I put two files in my src directory, cows.mpeg and trigger.mp4

import pathlib
import os

# This does all the work:
def get_file_list(fpath):
    EXTN = ['.avi', '.flv', '.mkv', '.mov', '.mp4',
        '.mpeg', '.mpg', '.webm', '.wmv']

    if not isinstance(fpath, pathlib.PosixPath):
        fpath = (pathlib.Path(fpath))

    return [filename for filename in fpath.iterdir()
        if filename.is_file() and (filename.suffix in EXTN)]


def main():
    filelist = []

    # anchor starting directory to script path
    os.chdir(os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__)))

    #create a pathlib path, here it is current path
    fpath = pathlib.Path('.')

    filelist = get_file_list(fpath)

    for filename in filelist:
        print(f"{filename.name}")


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

results:

Output:
cows.mpeg
trigger.mp4