Calling a function with an uninitialised variable that I want to convert to a string

Question

I'm a little stuck with what is probably a simple problem. There are probably several ways to resolve this issue so I thought I'd open it up to stackoverflow to suggest some different approaches. My code is below:

import os


root_directory = ('C:/path/to/files/')


def directories(*dirs):
    for directory in dirs:
        print(os.path.join(str((root_directory, directory))))


directories(inbox, test)

I want this to return:

('C:/path/to/files/inbox')
('C:/path/to/files/test')

but I'm getting a traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/path/to/files/python_file.py", line 24, in <module>
    directories(inbox, test)
NameError: name 'inbox' is not defined

I don't want to to call the function with the arugments as strings, i.e. directories('inbox', 'test')

I'm trying to create this function that will look in a variable number of sub-directories, based on how the function is called. So I might call directories(inbox) and it will look in the inbox folder, or i might call directories(inbox, test) and it will look in both the inbox and test folder.

Any help / suggestions would be much appreciated!

How do you expect the function to know what you mean by the variable `inbox` if you don't either declare it or pass `'inbox'` as a string? — CDJB, Dec 19 '19 at 11:50
You must specify directories as strings. As a workaround you could do `inbox = "inbox"`. — CristiFati, Dec 19 '19 at 11:51
You might want to explain why you don't want to use strings. — Matthias, Dec 19 '19 at 11:55

Vaibhav Jadhav · Accepted Answer · 2019-12-19T12:07:14.977

This will give you desired output: This is final output which you can get

import os
root_directory = ("C:/Users/vjadhav6/Desktop/")
def directories(*dirs):
    for directory in dirs[0]:
        print(os.path.join(str(root_directory) , directory))

d = {"inbox":"inbox","test":"test"}
directories(d.values())

OR

import os
root_directory = ("C:/Users/vjadhav6/Desktop/")
def directories(*dirs):
    for directory in dirs[0]:
        print(os.path.join(str(root_directory) , directory))
inbox = "inbox"
test = "test"
directories(inbox, test)

Calling a function with an uninitialised variable that I want to convert to a string

1 Answers1