11.8 fnmatch -- Unix filename pattern matching

This module provides support for Unix shell-style wildcards, which are not the same as regular expressions (which are documented in the re module). The special characters used in shell-style wildcards are:

Note that the filename separator ('/' on Unix) is not special to this module. See module glob for pathname expansion (glob uses fnmatch() to match pathname segments). Similarly, filenames starting with a period are not special for this module, and are matched by the * and ? patterns.

fnmatch( filename, pattern)

Test whether the filename string matches the pattern string, returning true or 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. If you require a case-sensitive comparison regardless of whether that's standard for your operating system, use fnmatchcase() instead.

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

fnmatchcase( filename, pattern)

Test whether filename matches pattern, returning true or false; the comparison is case-sensitive.

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. New in version 2.2.

translate( pattern)

Return the shell-style pattern converted to a regular expression.

Example:

>>> import fnmatch, re
>>>
>>> regex = fnmatch.translate('*.txt')
>>> regex
'.*\\.txt$'
>>> reobj = re.compile(regex)
>>> print reobj.match('foobar.txt')
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x...>