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:
| Pattern | Meaning |
|---|---|
| * | matches everything |
| ? | matches any single character |
| [seq] | matches any character in seq |
| [!seq] | matches any character not in seq |
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.
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. 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
Test whether filename matches pattern, returning True or False; the comparison is case-sensitive.
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.
Return the shell-style pattern converted to a regular expression.
Example:
>>> import fnmatch, re
>>>
>>> regex = fnmatch.translate('*.txt')
>>> regex
'.*\\.txt$'
>>> reobj = re.compile(regex)
>>> reobj.match('foobar.txt')
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x...>
See also