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:mod:`fnmatch` --- Unix filename pattern matching
=================================================
.. module:: fnmatch
:synopsis: Unix shell style filename pattern matching.
.. 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* |
+------------+------------------------------------+
.. 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 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 :func:`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)
.. function:: fnmatchcase(filename, pattern)
Test whether *filename* matches *pattern*, returning true or 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.
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...>
.. seealso::
Module :mod:`glob`
Unix shell-style path expansion.