Reading files in from the proper directory

[SMac2347 at comcast.net]

On Feb 7, 3:16 pm, Peter Otten <__pete... at web.de> wrote:
> SMac2... at comcast.net wrote:
> > xls_files   = glob.glob(in_dir + "*.xls")
>
> Try changing that to
>
> pattern = os.path.join(in_dir, "*.xls")
> xls_files = glob.glob(pattern)
>
> os.path.join() inserts a (back)slash between directory and filename if
> necessary.
>
> > merge_xls(in_dir="C:\Documents and Settings\smacdon\Desktop\09 Aggregate JWS")
>
> If you paste the directory name literal into the interactive interpreter
> you'll be surprised:
>
> >>> "C:\Documents and Settings\smacdon\Desktop\09 Aggregate JWS"
>
> 'C:\\Documents and Settings\\smacdon\\Desktop\x009 Aggregate JWS'
>
> "\09" is intrpreted as chr(9). Use a raw string to prevent Python from
> interpreting a backslash as the start of an escape sequence
>
> >>> r"C:\Documents and Settings\smacdon\Desktop\09 Aggregate JWS"
>
> 'C:\\Documents and Settings\\smacdon\\Desktop\\09 Aggregate JWS'
>
> or use forward slashes as directory separators.

Peter, thanks so much for your help, your suggestions were spot on. So
now my program runs and is able to find and process the files
correctly, but I end up getting the following message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/Documents and Settings/smacdon/My Documents/
excel_merge_files_indirectory v2.py", line 49, in <module>
    merge_xls(in_dir=r"C:\Documents and Settings\smacdon\Desktop\09
Aggregate JWS")
  File "C:/Documents and Settings/smacdon/My Documents/
excel_merge_files_indirectory v2.py", line 36, in merge_xls
    merged_book.save(out_file)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlwt\Workbook.py", line 634, in
save
    doc.save(filename, self.get_biff_data())
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlwt\CompoundDoc.py", line 507,
in save
    f = open(file_name_or_filelike_obj, 'wb')
TypeError: file() argument 1 must be encoded string without NULL
bytes, not str


If I am interpreting correctly, am I to understand that it would
appear the issue is tracing back to functions in the xlwt module? If
so, what can I do to fix this? Again, any and all help is appreciated!