Checking the Emptiness of a File

Determining whether a text file is empty or not is a common task in programming. This article explores a method to accomplish this check using the stat() function from the os module in Python.

The stat() Function

The os.stat() function provides comprehensive information about a file, including its size, permissions, and modification time. The st_size attribute within the returned object represents the file's size in bytes.

Checking for Empty Files

To check whether a file is empty, we can compare its size to zero. Here is an example in Python:

import os

file_path = "my_file.txt"
if os.stat(file_path).st_size == 0:
    print("The file is empty.")
else:
    print("The file is not empty.")

If the file specified by file_path has zero bytes, the if condition will evaluate to True, indicating an empty file. Otherwise, the file is not empty.