problems with opening files due to file's path

[Mike Driscoll]

On Jun 10, 11:45 am, Alexnb <alexnbr... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Gerhard Häring wrote:
>
> > Alexnb wrote:
> >> Okay, so what I want my program to do it open a file, a music file in
> >> specific, and for this we will say it is an .mp3. Well, I am using the
> >> system() command from the os class. [...]
>
> >> system("\"C:\Documents and Settings\Alex\My Documents\My
> >> Music\Rhapsody\Bryanbros\Weezer\(2001)\04 - Island In The Sun.wma\"")
> >> [...]
>
> > Try os.startfile() instead. It should work better.
>
> > -- Gerhard
>
> > --
> >http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
> No, it didn't work, but it gave me some interesting feedback when I ran it
> in the shell. Heres what it told me:
>
> >>> os.startfile("C:\Documents and Settings\Alex\My Documents\My
> >>> Music\Rhapsody\Bryanbros\Jason Mraz\I'm Yours (Single)\01 - I'm
> >>> Yours.wma")
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<pyshell#10>", line 1, in <module>
>     os.startfile("C:\Documents and Settings\Alex\My Documents\My
> Music\Rhapsody\Bryanbros\Jason Mraz\I'm Yours (Single)\01 - I'm Yours.wma")
>
> WindowsError: [Error 2] The system cannot find the file specified:
> "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Alex\\My Documents\\My
> Music\\Rhapsody\\Bryanbros\\Jason Mraz\\I'm Yours (Single)\x01 - I'm
> Yours.wma"
>
> See it made each backslash into two, and the one by the parenthesis and the
> 0 turned into an x....
> --
> View this message in context:http://www.nabble.com/problems-with-opening-files-due-to-file%27s-pat...
> Sent from the Python - python-list mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Yeah. You need to either double all the backslashes or make it a raw
string by adding an "r" to the beginning, like so:

os.startfile(r'C:\path\to\my\file')

HTH

Mike