<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm quite new to Python and I don't know if this is a FAQ (I can't > find it) or an obvious question. I'm using the RE module in python, and I > would like to be able to contruct something like the Window$ "Find Files Or > Folders" engine. As the Window$ users know, you can filter the file names > using the character "*", as: > > myfilen* (Will find a file named myfilenames) > *yf*nam* (Will find a file named myfilenames)
in Unix lingo, that's known as a "glob" pattern. it's not really a regular expression. if you insist on using regular expressions, you can use the fnmatch.translate function to convert from pattern to expression: >>> import fnmatch >>> fnmatch.translate("myfilen*") 'myfilen.*$' >>> fnmatch.translate("*yf*nam*") '.*yf.*nam.*$' or you can use fnmatch.filter() to find matching names in a list: >>> fnmatch.filter(["hello.txt", "bye.txt", "spam.egg"], "*.txt") ['hello.txt', 'bye.txt'] but it's likely that what you really want is the "glob" module, which looks for files matching a given pattern: >>> import glob >>> glob.glob("*.txt") ['key.txt', 'some_document.txt'] more info here: http://docs.python.org/lib/module-glob.html http://docs.python.org/lib/module-fnmatch.html </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list