Folder Collapse

Collapse a Folder

The Folder class offers a method to flatten an entire folder structure.

---

Basic Flattening of a folder

We create the folder structure:

example
├── a.txt
├── test
│   ├── b.txt
│   ├── temp
│   │   └── c.txt

... and want to flatten it to:

example
├── a.txt
├── b.txt
└── c.txt

We can achieve that with the following code:

from fl import File, Folder, Example

# Create the example folder structure
Example.create_simple_nested()

# Collapse the folder structure
d = Folder("./example/")
d.collapse()

---

Flattening with a rename

Now we have this folder structure:

example
├── a.txt
├── test
│   ├── a.txt
│   ├── b.txt
│   ├── temp
│   │   ├── a.txt
│   │   ├── b.txt
│   │   └── c.txt

Flattening it normally will not work, because the file a.txt and b.txt would exist multiple times in the same folder. So to avoid that, the collapse method can take an optional renaming function:

from fl import File, Folder, Example

# Create the example folder structure
Example.create_nested_with_duplicates()

# Collapse the folder structure with a rename
d = Folder("./example/")
d.collapse(rename_func="%B %C[-]%E")

This code will result in:

example
├── a test-temp.txt
├── a test.txt
├── a.txt
├── b test-temp.txt
├── b test.txt
└── c test-temp.txt

The magic happens here: rename_func="%B %C[-]%E" FL is able to execute special commands on a string renaming function:

• %B - Name of the file (without extension type) or folder
• %E - Extension type of the file (with .)
• %C[...] - Collapsed folder names joined with the given sequence between [ and ]

Read more about renaming commands here.

---

Flattening with a normal renaming function

Once again we have the following folder structure:

example
├── a.txt
├── test
│   ├── a.txt
│   ├── b.txt
│   ├── temp
│   │   ├── a.txt
│   │   ├── b.txt
│   │   └── c.txt

... but this time we don't want to use the special string commands for renaming, but another function that we define ourselves:

from fl import File, Folder, Example

def do_rename(file, collapsed) -> str:
    name = file.get_basename()
    extension = file.get_extension()
    
    depth = len(collapsed)

    return name + " " + str(depth) + extension

This function will add the number of folders that have been collapsed to the name. (The collapse method of the folder passes the a list of the collapsed folders to the do_rename function)

To run:

# [...]

# Create the example folder structure:
Example.create_nested_with_duplicates()

# Collapse the folder structure
d = Folder("./example/")
d.collapse(rename_func=do_rename)
d.print_beautified()

Folder.print_beautified ( ) prints the folder in the console. Console:

example
├── a 1.txt
├── a 2.txt
├── a.txt
├── b 1.txt
├── b 2.txt
└── c 2.txt