How to read a media file from .py file using Django?

Question

I can read a.txt file like this:

text = open('a.txt', 'rb').read()

But when I put the a.txt to the media folder, this doesn't work:

text = open('/media/a.txt', 'rb').read()

I'm getting the following error:

IOError at /
[Errno 13] file not accessible: '/media/a.txt'

How can I read file from the media directory?

Answer 1

To be more generic (and be sure that you use the media folder), you could change it to:

import os
from django.conf import settings
text = open(os.path.join(settings.MEDIA_ROOT, 'a.txt'), 'rb').read()