CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-2.7
Varunkumar Manohar
Varunkumar Manohar

Reputation: 959

pattern matching the directory contents in python

I have a directory with a list of files and I would like to match the contents of the direcotry with a pattern

>>os.listdir(os.getcwd()) gives
[2010.1.1-19999, 2011.1.1-124444]

>> fnmatch.filter(os.listdir(os.getcwd()),"\d+\.\d\.\d\-\d+")
[]

The result is null and the fnmatch function does not pattern match the contents of the directory listing.

what is the error here ?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 534

Answers (1)

Martijn Pieters
Martijn Pieters

Reputation: 1121196

"\d+\.\d\.\d\-\d+" is not a fnmatch globbing pattern, it's a regular expression. From the module documentation:

This module provides support for Unix shell-style wildcards, which are not the same as regular expressions (which are documented in the re module).

If you wanted to use a regular expression, use the re module to test your filenames:

import re

[filename for filename in os.listdir() if re.match(r"^\d+\.\d\.\d\-\d+$", filename)]

As a side note, if you find yourself using fnmatch.filter(os.listdir(directory), pattern), then just use glob.glob(os.path.join(directory, pattern)) instead.

Upvotes: 1

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