Creating a File

00:00 Let’s create a file inside of that monthly directory. I want to make some resolutions for coming January. So let’s say I will create a january_path file inside of the monthly_dir, and I’ll call it "january.txt".

00:21 That’ll contain some aims for the coming year, let’s say. So I’ve created the path. The path is here, but the file doesn’t exist yet. Now, if I want to create the file, I can say january_path.touch() … and this .exists() ….

00:47 actually created a .txt file. Let’s double-check that this is actually a file,

00:55 and there it is. If I use .is_file() on the Path object, then I get a True. So I just created file called january.txt.

01:06 If you call .touch() again on an existing file, then it doesn’t raise an error like it does with directories that already exist. So I can do this, and there’s no penalty for me.

01:18 Nothing happens really, except that the timestamp gets updated. Now, you can’t create a file inside of a path structure that doesn’t entirely exist. There’s no equivalent to the parents=True attribute that you can use for directories.

01:34 If I tried to create too_much_future_path inside of a directory that doesn’t exist, let’s say inside of Path.home() /

01:51 "notes" / and then I will create a path that doesn’t exist. I’ll say there’s a "yearly" folder, but I’ve never created this one.

01:59 And then inside of too_much_future_path—oh, I forgot to put a file on there, so let me add that.

02:10 I’m just going to overwrite the variable here to also add a filename, "3033.txt".

02:19 So now the too_much_future_path is here, and the path points to a file called 3033.txt inside of a folder called yearly. However, that yearly folder doesn’t exist.

02:31 So if now I tried to create this file by saying .touch(), Python will give me a FileNotFoundError. The reason for this is that yearly, this folder, just doesn’t exist.

02:45 You need to have all the containing parents folders created before creating a file. There is no parents=True parameter that you can pass to the .touch() method, but what you can do is you can use the .parent attribute on the path to return a Path object and then create that folder.

03:04 So since there’s only one directory missing, this one, you can say too_much_future_path.parent. This will point to the Path object that goes to the subfolder yearly, and I can say .mkdir().

03:24 Optionally, if there were multiple directories that didn’t exist in between here, you could pass parents=True, and then after calling this function, you can say too_much_future_path.touch().

03:40 And now it went through. This file was created as well.

03:47 So by combining the attributes and methods that you have available on Path objects, you can perform a lot of common files operations such as creating directories and creating files. In the next lesson, let’s do a quick recap of the different methods that you saw.