Accessing multiple files from Google Drive in Google Colab

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1

I’m working on a project in Google Colab and need to process multiple files stored in my Google Drive. The files are in a folder called my_project and have names starting with my_data.

I want to loop through these files and apply a function to each one. Something like this:

for file in get_files('/my_project/my_data*'):
    process_file(file)

I’ve looked at some examples online but they mostly show how to load single files into the notebook. This won’t work for me because I have many files to process.

Is there a way to access multiple files from Google Drive in Colab without downloading them all at once? How can I set up a loop to process these files efficiently?

Any help or tips would be really appreciated. Thanks!

2

hey isaac, you can use google drive api for this. first, mount ur drive with drive.mount('/content/drive'). then use glob module to get file paths:

import glob
files = glob.glob('/content/drive/My Drive/my_project/my_data*')
for file in files:
    process_file(file)

this should work without downloading everything. good luck!

3

I’ve dealt with a similar situation before, and I found that using the google.colab module in combination with glob works really well for this kind of task. Here’s what I did:

First, authenticate and mount your Google Drive:

from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')

Then, use glob to get all the files matching your pattern:

import glob
file_list = glob.glob('/content/drive/My Drive/my_project/my_data*')

Now you can iterate through the files and process them:

for file_path in file_list:
    process_file(file_path)

This approach allows you to work with the files directly from Google Drive without downloading them all at once. It’s efficient and worked great for my project with hundreds of files. Just make sure your process_file function can handle file paths from Google Drive.

4

Having worked with Google Colab and Drive extensively, I can suggest a more streamlined approach using the os module. After mounting your Drive, you can use os.listdir() to get the files and os.path.join() for full paths:

from google.colab import drive

drive.mount('/content/drive')

import os

folder_path = '/content/drive/My Drive/my_project'
files = [f for f in os.listdir(folder_path) if f.startswith('my_data')]

for file in files:
    full_path = os.path.join(folder_path, file)
    process_file(full_path)

This method is efficient and doesn’t require additional imports. It also gives you more control over file selection if needed. Remember to handle any potential I/O errors in your process_file function for robust operation.