Python: Check if file from list exists, execute function only if it exists

You have a couple problems in your code.

First, chkifexists is returning as soon as it finds an existing file, so it never checks any remaining names; also, if no files are found then the hashcolumn and filepathNum are never set -- giving you the UnboundLocalError.

Second, you are calling chkifexists in two places -- from removedupes and from CleanAndPrettify. So removedupes will run for every existing file for every existing file -- not what you want! In fact, since CleanAndPrettify has just verified the file exists removedupes should just go with whatever is handed to it.

There are at least three ways to handle the case where no files are found: have chkifexists raise an exception; have a flag in CleanAndPrettify that tracks if files were found; or turn the results of chkifexists into a list which you can then check for emptiness.

In the modified code I moved the files into a dictionary with the name as the key and the value as a tuple of hashcolumn and filepathNum. chkifexists now accepts the filenames to look for as a dictionary, and yields the values when a file is found; if no files were found, a NoFilesFound exception will be raised.

Here's the code:

import os, csv

# store file attributes for easy modifications
# format is 'filename': (hashcolumn, filepathNum)
files = {
        'A.csv': (7, 5),
        'B.csv': (15, 5),
        'C.csv': (1, 0),
        }

class NoFilesFound(Exception):
    "No .csv files were found to clean up"

def chkifexists(somefiles):
    # load all three at once, but only yield them if filename
    # is found
    filesfound = False
    for fname, (hashcolumn, filepathNum) in somefiles.items():
        if os.path.isfile(fname):
            filesfound = True
            yield fname, hashcolumn, filepathNum
    if not filesfound:
        raise NoFilesFound

def removedupes(infile, outfile, hashcolumn, filepathNum):
    # this is now a single-run function
    r1 = file(infile, 'rb')
    r2 = csv.reader(r1)
    w1 = file(outfile, 'wb')
    w2 = csv.writer(w1)
    hashes = set()
    for row in r2:
        if row[hashcolumn] =="": 
            w2.writerow(row)       
            hashes.add(row[hashcolumn])  
        if row[hashcolumn] not in hashes:
            w2.writerow(row)
            hashes.add(row[hashcolumn])
    w1.close()
    r1.close()


def bakcount(origfile1, origfile2):
    '''This function creates a .bak file of the original and does a row count
    to determine the number of rows removed'''
    os.rename(origfile1, origfile1+".bak")
    count1 = len(open(origfile1+".bak").readlines())
    #print count1

    os.rename(origfile2, origfile1)
    count2 = len(open(origfile1).readlines())
    #print count2

    print str(count1 - count2) + " duplicate rows removed from " \
        + str(origfile1) +"!"


def CleanAndPrettify():
    print "Removing duplicate rows from input files..."
    try:
        for fname, hashcolumn, filepathNum in chkifexists(files):
            removedupes(
                   fname,
                   os.path.splitext(fname)[0] + "2.csv",
                   hashcolumn,
                   filepathNum,
                   )
            bakcount (fname, os.path.splitext(fname)[0] + "2.csv")
    except NoFilesFound:
        print "no files to clean up"

CleanAndPrettify()

Unable to test as I don't have the A, B, and C .csv files, but hopefully this will get you pointed in the right direction. As you can see, the raise NoFilesFound option uses the flag method to keep track of files not being found; here is the list method:

def chkifexists(somefiles):
    # load all three at once, but only yield them if filename
    # is found
    for fname, (hashcolumn, filepathNum) in somefiles.items():
        if os.path.isfile(fname):
            filesfound = True
            yield fname, hashcolumn, filepathNum

def CleanAndPrettify():
    print "Removing duplicate rows from input files..."
    found_files = list(chkifexists(files))
    if not found_files:
        print "no files to clean up"
    else:
        for fname, hashcolumn, filepathNum in found_files:
            removedupes(...)
            bakcount(...)