Dive Into Python

Example 6.21. listDirectory

def listDirectory(directory, fileExtList):                                         
    "get list of file info objects for files of particular extensions"
    fileList = [os.path.normcase(f)
                for f in os.listdir(directory)]           
    fileList = [os.path.join(directory, f) 
               for f in fileList
                if os.path.splitext(f)[1] in fileExtList]                          
    def getFileInfoClass(filename, module=sys.modules[FileInfo.__module__]):       
        "get file info class from filename extension"                             
        subclass = "%sFileInfo" % os.path.splitext(filename)[1].upper()[1:]        
        return hasattr(module, subclass) and getattr(module, subclass) or FileInfo 
    return [getFileInfoClass(f)(f) for f in fileList]                              

	listDirectory is the main attraction of this entire module. It takes a directory (like c:\music\_singles\ in my case) and a list of interesting file extensions (like ['.mp3']), and it returns a list of class instances that act like dictionaries that contain metadata about each interesting file in that directory. And it does it in just a few straightforward lines of code.
	As you saw in the previous section, this line of code gets a list of the full pathnames of all the files in directory that have an interesting file extension (as specified by fileExtList).
	Old-school Pascal programmers may be familiar with them, but most people give me a blank stare when I tell them that Python supports nested functions -- literally, a function within a function. The nested function getFileInfoClass can be called only from the function in which it is defined, listDirectory. As with any other function, you don't need an interface declaration or anything fancy; just define the function and code it.
	Now that you've seen the os module, this line should make more sense. It gets the extension of the file (os.path.splitext(filename)[1]), forces it to uppercase (.upper()), slices off the dot ([1:]), and constructs a class name out of it with string formatting. So c:\music\ap\mahadeva.mp3 becomes .mp3 becomes .MP3 becomes MP3 becomes MP3FileInfo.
	Having constructed the name of the handler class that would handle this file, you check to see if that handler class actually exists in this module. If it does, you return the class, otherwise you return the base class FileInfo. This is a very important point: this function returns a class. Not an instance of a class, but the class itself.
	For each file in the “interesting files” list (fileList), you call getFileInfoClass with the filename (f). Calling getFileInfoClass(f) returns a class; you don't know exactly which class, but you don't care. You then create an instance of this class (whatever it is) and pass the filename (f again), to the __init__ method. As you saw earlier in this chapter, the __init__ method of FileInfo sets self["name"], which triggers __setitem__, which is overridden in the descendant (MP3FileInfo) to parse the file appropriately to pull out the file's metadata. You do all that for each interesting file and return a list of the resulting instances.