# 10.8. `fnmatch` — Unix filename pattern matching

Source code: Lib/fnmatch.py

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

For a literal match, wrap the meta-characters in brackets. For example, `'[?]'` matches the character `'?'`.

Note that the filename separator (`'/'` on Unix) is not special to this module. See module `glob` for pathname expansion (`glob` uses `filter()` 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`. Both parameters are case-normalized using `os.path.normcase()`. `fnmatchcase()` can be used to perform a case-sensitive comparison, regardless of whether that’s standard for the operating system.

  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 and does not apply `os.path.normcase()`.

`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 for using with `re.match()`.

  Example:

      >>> import fnmatch, re
      >>>
      >>> regex = fnmatch.translate('*.txt')
      >>> regex
      '.*\\.txt\\Z(?ms)'
      >>> reobj = re.compile(regex)
      >>> reobj.match('foobar.txt')
      <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x...>

See also

Module `glob`
  Unix shell-style path expansion.