Python Imports

I currently use Spacemacs as a development environment. I open a .py file, then run-python to startup an interactive shell. In Spacemacs, the shell’s pwd is assigned to where run-python was executed. So, if it was executed in the .py file, the pwd would be the files subdirectory, rather than the projects root.

With data science development, csvs live in a data folder accessible from the top level of the directory. project_directory/data. If the Python file I am using is in project/src, if I wanted to read in a csv from the data folder I would use the relative path pd.read_csv('../data/target_csv'). This will only work if the interpreter’s pwd is the src directory.

To fix this problem, I included the following code at the top of my .py file:

import os  
  
cur_dir = os.getcwd()  
root = cur_dir.split('project_directory')[0]  

This retrieves the absolute file path to the project root, and assigns it to the root variable. Then, when loading csv, I concatenate root with the path from the top level of the directory, like so:

df = pd.read_csv(root+'project_directory/data/target.csv')