Getting File Paths from the User

File Dialog

Periodically, you'll want to get the path to a file from the user. The tkinter library (which will look at in more detail soon) contains a class called filedialog that allows you to get the path to a file from the user. The code below will get the path to a file to open from the user.

# import Tkinter, Tkinter's FileDialog, the shapefile module, and os.path
import tkinter
import tkinter.filedialog


# initialize Tkinter
root = tkinter.Tk()

# Get a full path to a shapefile from the user
FilePath = tkinter.filedialog.askopenfilename(filetypes=[("allfiles","*")])

There is also an asksavefilename function to get the path to a file to save to.