In my job, I find myself constantly dealing with batches of pdf files, and sometimes forced to write quick scripts on the fly to solve immediate problems.

I have also found that I constantly need the same routines again and again, so the best idea was to pack them in a library available everwhere.

This sort of thing, is of course, well known to experienced programmers, and therefore aimed primarily at newbies.

Getting started:

Find the folder/directory where Python holds all it's modules.

Start Python3 in terminal and type in the following:

import sys

print('\n'.join(sys.path))

This should return something like the following:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/lib/python35.zip
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/lib/python3.5
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/lib/python3.5/plat-darwin
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/lib/python3.5/lib-dynload
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/lib/python3.5/site-packages

No matter which platform you are using, you will always get paths to common directories, take a look at the contents of these directories and you will find some familiar file names, these are the installed modules.

Now you can copy "getfolderitem.py" into one of these diectories, I personally like /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/lib/python3.5

Now run demo.py in Terminal, PyCharm, Eric or Idle (as you please)

The options in module "getfolderitem" are :-

.folder() path to folder
.pdffile() path to pdf file
.jpgfile() path to jpg/jpeg file
.tiffile() path to tif/tiff file
.pngfile() path to png file
.txtfile() path to txt file
.anyfile() path to any file
.foldercontents("pdf") returns a list of files in the selected folder, filters with file type e.g. "pdf"

Author: Steve Clements