Try and except with os.chdir

June 3, 2022

I work from two different computers with the same script. Writing files to my cloud storage \has a slightly different path on both computers. I thought I could use a try-except to simply see which path works (depending on which computer I am using).

I thought I could solve this by doing the following:

import os
try:
    os.chdir('C://Users//comp1//Cloud//Data')
except:
    os.chdir('C://Users//comp2//Cloud//Data')

However if I run it, I still get:

FileNotFoundError: [WinError 3] The system cannot find the path specified: 'C://Users//comp1//Cloud//Data')

Could someone tell me what I am doing wrong here, or whether I should perhaps use a different solution.

>Solution :

As multiple comments have suggested, replace the double forward slashes with one forward slash, or use double backward slashes.

Now I ran your code and it does seem to work, but it depends on the context (is this your entire script?). However you could do better with a if-else statement rather than try-except because the latter is a lot slower first of all, and generally not the best practice.

import os

if os.path.isdir('C:/Users/comp1/Cloud/Data'):
    os.chdir('C:/Users/comp1/Cloud/Data')
elif os.path.isdir('C:/Users/comp2/Cloud/Data'):
    os.chdir('C:/Users/comp2/Cloud/Data')

If you’d like to stick to try-except and neither directories exist, you could try using nesting your try-except like this:

Edit: Forgot to mention, thanks @Tzane, do not use bare try-except statements.

import os

try:
    try:
        os.chdir('C:/Users/comp1/Cloud/Data')
    except FileNotFoundError:
        os.chdir('C:/Users/comp2/Cloud/Data')
except FileNotFoundError:
    # handle the case where neither directory exist
    pass

Or to combine the two suggestions:

import os

if os.path.isdir('C:/Users/comp1/Cloud/Data'):
    os.chdir('C:/Users/comp1/Cloud/Data')
elif os.path.isdir('C:/Users/comp2/Cloud/Data'):
    os.chdir('C:/Users/comp2/Cloud/Data')
else:
    # handle the case where neither directory exist
    pass