Concatenate a directory full of files into a single prompt for use with LLMs

For background on this project see Building files-to-prompt entirely using Claude 3 Opus.

Install this tool using pip:

pip install files-to-prompt

To use files-to-prompt, provide the path to one or more files or directories you want to process:

files-to-prompt path/to/file_or_directory [path/to/another/file_or_directory ...]

This will output the contents of every file, with each file preceded by its relative path and separated by ---.

• -e/--extension <extension>: Only include files with the specified extension. Can be used multiple times.

  files-to-prompt path/to/directory -e txt -e md

• --include-hidden: Include files and folders starting with . (hidden files and directories).

  files-to-prompt path/to/directory --include-hidden

• --ignore <pattern>: Specify one or more patterns to ignore. Can be used multiple times. Patterns may match file names and directory names, unless you also specify --ignore-files-only. Pattern syntax uses fnmatch, which supports *, ?, [anychar], [!notchars] and [?] for special character literals.

  files-to-prompt path/to/directory --ignore "*.log" --ignore "temp*"

• --ignore-files-only: Include directory paths which would otherwise be ignored by an --ignore pattern.

  files-to-prompt path/to/directory --ignore-files-only --ignore "*dir*"

• --ignore-gitignore: Ignore .gitignore files and include all files.

  files-to-prompt path/to/directory --ignore-gitignore

• -c/--cxml: Output in Claude XML format.

  files-to-prompt path/to/directory --cxml

• -o/--output <file>: Write the output to a file instead of printing it to the console.

  files-to-prompt path/to/directory -o output.txt

• -n/--line-numbers: Include line numbers in the output.

  files-to-prompt path/to/directory -n

  Example output:

  files_to_prompt/cli.py --- 1 import os 2 from fnmatch import fnmatch 3 4 import click ... 

Suppose you have a directory structure like this:

my_directory/ ├── file1.txt ├── file2.txt ├── .hidden_file.txt ├── temp.log └── subdirectory/ └── file3.txt 

Running files-to-prompt my_directory will output:

my_directory/file1.txt --- Contents of file1.txt --- my_directory/file2.txt --- Contents of file2.txt --- my_directory/subdirectory/file3.txt --- Contents of file3.txt --- 

If you run files-to-prompt my_directory --include-hidden, the output will also include .hidden_file.txt:

my_directory/.hidden_file.txt --- Contents of .hidden_file.txt --- ... 

If you run files-to-prompt my_directory --ignore "*.log", the output will exclude temp.log:

my_directory/file1.txt --- Contents of file1.txt --- my_directory/file2.txt --- Contents of file2.txt --- my_directory/subdirectory/file3.txt --- Contents of file3.txt --- 

If you run files-to-prompt my_directory --ignore "sub*", the output will exclude all files in subdirectory/ (unless you also specify --ignore-files-only):

my_directory/file1.txt --- Contents of file1.txt --- my_directory/file2.txt --- Contents of file2.txt --- 

Anthropic has provided specific guidelines for optimally structuring prompts to take advantage of Claude's extended context window.

To structure the output in this way, use the optional --cxml flag, which will produce output like this:

<documents> <document index="1"> <source>my_directory/file1.txt</source> <document_content> Contents of file1.txt </document_content> </document> <document index="2"> <source>my_directory/file2.txt</source> <document_content> Contents of file2.txt </document_content> </document> </documents>

To contribute to this tool, first checkout the code. Then create a new virtual environment:

cd files-to-prompt python -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate

Now install the dependencies and test dependencies:

pip install -e '.[test]'

To run the tests:

pytest