Is there a way to order imported files before they are brought into a loop?

Question

I am attempting to convert all .job files in a folder into a single pdf. this code does that however they are in no particular order. I would like them to be imported in the order of the time the file was created or their filename it follows a set pattern 'XXX_1.jpg'

This is what I have so far:

import img2pdf
os.chdir('C:/Path')
# convert all files ending in .jpg inside a directory

with open("output.pdf", "wb") as f:
    f.write(img2pdf.convert([i for i in os.listdir('.') if i.endswith(".jpg")]))

Answer 1

First, you can use glob to gather all the paths of the files in your directory into a list. Then with os module getctime, you can get the list of time of creation. I zipped both list, then made a dictionary whose keys are the file path and values - time of creation. Finally i got the dictionary arrange by values using the operator module to arrange all dictionary in descending order of values(i.e newest file first)

import os
import glob
import operator
import img2pdf

a= glob.glob("my_directory/*.jpg")
b = [os.path.getctime(i) for i in a]
c = {}
for i,j  in list(zip(a,b)):
    c[i] = j
sorted_c = dict(sorted(c.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(1),reverse=True))
with open("output.pdf", "wb") as f:
    f.write(img2pdf.convert([k for k in sorted_c]))

Answer 2

If i'm not mistaken, os.listdir returns a name-sorted list by default. If you want to sort them by last modification time, you can sort them using os.getmtime as a key:

#import img2pdf
#import os

os.chdir('C:/Path')
paths = sorted(os.listdir('.'), key=os.path.getmtime)

with open("output.pdf", "wb") as f:
    f.write(img2pdf.convert([i for i in paths if i.endswith(".jpg")]))

See the documentation for more info: https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.path.html

os.path.getmtime(path)

• Return the time of last modification of path. The return value is a floating point number giving the number of seconds since the epoch (see the time module). Raise OSError if the file does not exist or is inaccessible.