Section 1.1: Setting Up the Environment

The first step involved importing the necessary packages:

# Used to find names of the files in a given directory

import glob

# Used collections to identify names that only appeared once

from collections import Counter

# Used to copy files to a secondary directory for processing

import shutil

Next, I gathered a list of all the files within the PDF directory. I printed the length of my files list to ascertain how many files I had to manage.

files = glob.glob(r'D:pdfscitibankpdfs*.*')

print(len(files))

Glob returns the filename along with its full path. I only required the name without the extension, so I used os.path.basename while excluding the last four characters. I compiled these names into a list called pdfs.

pdfs = []

for file in files:

pdfs.append(os.path.basename(file[:-4]))

I then created a Counter object from the pdfs list and employed a list comprehension to identify unique file names. This revealed that I had 2758 unique files.

# Counter for the list of pdfs

c = Counter(pdfs)

# List of files occurring once identified using list comprehension

unprocessed = [n for n in c if c[n] == 1]

Section 1.2: Finding Unprocessed Files

With the list of unprocessed files established, I needed to obtain their full paths. Although I could have concatenated the path and extension due to their uniformity, I chose to implement a for loop for clarity.

I initiated an empty list to hold the files designated for moving, then created a nested for loop. The outer loop iterated through the unprocessed file names, while the inner loop traversed the original file names. If a match was found, the file name was added to moveFiles. While this may not be the most efficient method, it was effective and executed swiftly.

moveFiles = []

for name in unprocessed:

for file in files:

if name in file:

moveFiles.append(file)

Finally, I copied the identified files into a subdirectory and re-launched PDFElement to finalize the conversion.

for file in moveFiles:

shutil.copy(file, r'D:pdfscitibankpdfsmissed')

And that’s how I handled the process. Thank you for taking the time to read through my experience.