``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. 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. 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 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. 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...> See also: Module ``glob`` Unix shell-style path expansion.