10.8. fnmatch — Unix filename pattern matching

Python v2.7.1

10.8. 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:

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.

See also

Latest version of the fnmatch Python source code

fnmatch.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. 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
fnmatch.fnmatchcase(filename, pattern)
Test whether filename matches pattern, returning True or False; the comparison is case-sensitive.
fnmatch.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.

fnmatch.translate(pattern)

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

Be aware there is no way to quote meta-characters.

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

Module glob
Unix shell-style path expansion.