:mod:`fnmatch` --- Unix filename pattern matching
.. module:: fnmatch :synopsis: Unix shell style filename pattern matching.
Source code: :source:`Lib/fnmatch.py`
.. index:: single: filenames; wildcard expansion
.. index:: module: re
This module provides support for Unix shell-style wildcards, which are not the same as regular expressions (which are documented in the :mod:`re` module). The special characters used in shell-style wildcards are:
Pattern | Meaning |
---|---|
* |
matches everything |
? |
matches any single character |
[seq] |
matches any character in seq |
[!seq] |
matches any character not in seq |
For a literal match, wrap the meta-characters in brackets.
For example, '[?]'
matches the character '?'
.
.. index:: module: glob
Note that the filename separator ('/'
on Unix) is not special to this
module. See module :mod:`glob` for pathname expansion (:mod:`glob` uses
:func:`fnmatch` to match pathname segments). Similarly, filenames starting with
a period are not special for this module, and are matched by the *
and ?
patterns.
.. function:: fnmatch(filename, pattern) Test whether the *filename* string matches the *pattern* string, returning :const:`True` or :const:`False`. If the operating system is case-insensitive, then both parameters will be normalized to all lower- or upper-case before the comparison is performed. :func:`fnmatchcase` can be used to perform a case-sensitive comparison, regardless of whether that's standard for the operating system. This example will print all file names in the current directory with the extension ``.txt``:: import fnmatch import os for file in os.listdir('.'): if fnmatch.fnmatch(file, '*.txt'): print(file)
.. function:: fnmatchcase(filename, pattern) Test whether *filename* matches *pattern*, returning :const:`True` or :const:`False`; the comparison is case-sensitive.
.. function:: filter(names, pattern) Return the subset of the list of *names* that match *pattern*. It is the same as ``[n for n in names if fnmatch(n, pattern)]``, but implemented more efficiently.
.. function:: translate(pattern) Return the shell-style *pattern* converted to a regular expression for using with :func:`re.match`. Example: >>> import fnmatch, re >>> >>> regex = fnmatch.translate('*.txt') >>> regex '.*\\.txt\\Z(?ms)' >>> reobj = re.compile(regex) >>> reobj.match('foobar.txt') <_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(0, 10), match='foobar.txt'>
.. seealso:: Module :mod:`glob` Unix shell-style path expansion.