Python Library Reference

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6.22 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(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.

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.

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Python Library Reference

Previous: 6.21 glob Up: 6. Generic Operating System Next: 6.23 shutil

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Release 2.2.2, documentation updated on October 14, 2002.