os.list dir not working

[Kristenl2784]

To debug a problem like this the first thing I would do is verify I am getting a list of files.

input_dir = 'C:/Users/work/comparison'
for file in os.listdir(input_dir):
    print(file, os.path.isfile(file), file.endswith(".xlsx"))

Well, that isn't true. The first thing I would do is replace os with pathlib

from pathlib import Path

input_dir = Path('C:/Users/work/comparison')
for file in input_dir.iterdir():
    print(file, Path.isfile(file), file.endswith(".xlsx"))

Either way the first thing is make sure I am getting a list of files. If that doesn't work nothing else is going to work. If I am getting files I want to verify that my test for spreadsheet files is going to work.

Usually I don't wait for errors to occur to do debugging. If I am unsure about anything I usually write it as test. With your code I probably would have started like this:

import openpyxl as xl 
import os
import pandas as pd
import xlsxwriter
 
input_dir = 'C:/Users/work/comparison'
files = []

for file in os.listdir(input_dir):
    input_file =  os.path.join(input_dir, file)
    print(file, input_file, os.path.isfile(file), file.endswith(".xlsx"))

for file in files: 
   input_file =  os.path.join(input_dir, file)
   wb1=xl.load_workbook(input_file)
   ws1=wb1.worksheets[0]

When I was confident about finding spreadsheet files in the directory I would then remove the test and replace with the list comprehension. When I run this on my computer (with a different input_dir) it was pretty obvious why "files" in your code is an empty list.

I don't think I follow what you're doing or trying to explain. Also, my code works fine if the .xlsx files are in with the code, one directory back. But when I place the .xlsx files one directory up into their own folder, and update the input_dir path it doesn't find any files.

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This worked:
files = [file for file in os.listdir(input_dir)
if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(input_dir, file)) and file.endswith(".xlsx")]