Calling a definition

[Tim Chase]

> I have a piece of code that I need some help with. It is
> supposed (in my mind at least) take two arguments, a start
> path and a file extension. Then when called it should return
> each of the file paths that are found matching the criteria.
> It is only returning the first file that it finds. What am I
> doing wrong?


  1 def findFileExt(startPath, fileExt):
  2     for root, dirs, files in os.walk(startPath):
  3         for file in files:
  4             if file.endswith(fileExt):
  5                 filePath = str(os.path.join(root, file))
  6                 return filePath

On line 7, you return from the function which prevents the
remainder of the code in the function/loop from being
processed.

You'd either have go gather them all in a list and then
return that gathered list:

  1 def findFileExt(startPath, fileExt):
+      results = []
  2     for root, dirs, files in os.walk(startPath):
  3         for file in files:
  4             if file.endswith(fileExt):
  5                 filePath = str(os.path.join(root, file))
-6                 return filePath
+                  results.append(filePath)
+      return results

or, you could write it as a generator:

  1 def findFileExt(startPath, fileExt):
  2     for root, dirs, files in os.walk(startPath):
  3         for file in files:
  4             if file.endswith(fileExt):
  5                 filePath = str(os.path.join(root, file))
-7                 return filePath
+                  yield filePath

which can then be used like

	for thing in findFileExt(src_path, ext):
		do_something(thing)

-tkc