7. glob — Unix style pathname pattern expansion¶

Source code: :source:`Lib/glob.py`

The glob module finds all the pathnames matching a specified pattern according to the rules used by the Unix shell, although results are returned in arbitrary order. No tilde expansion is done, but *, ?, and character ranges expressed with [] will be correctly matched. This is done by using the os.listdir() and fnmatch.fnmatch() functions in concert, and not by actually invoking a subshell. Note that unlike fnmatch.fnmatch(), glob treats filenames beginning with a dot (.) as special cases. (For tilde and shell variable expansion, use os.path.expanduser() and os.path.expandvars().)

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

glob.glob(pathname)[source]¶

Return a possibly-empty list of path names that match pathname, which must be a string containing a path specification. pathname can be either absolute (like /usr/src/Python-1.5/Makefile) or relative (like ../../Tools/*/*.gif), and can contain shell-style wildcards. Broken symlinks are included in the results (as in the shell).

glob.iglob(pathname)[source]¶

Return an iterator which yields the same values as glob() without actually storing them all simultaneously.

New in version 2.5.

For example, consider a directory containing only the following files: 1.gif, 2.txt, and card.gif. glob() will produce the following results. Notice how any leading components of the path are preserved.

>>> import glob
>>> glob.glob('./[0-9].*')
['./1.gif', './2.txt']
>>> glob.glob('*.gif')
['1.gif', 'card.gif']
>>> glob.glob('?.gif')
['1.gif']

If the directory contains files starting with . they won’t be matched by default. For example, consider a directory containing card.gif and .card.gif:

>>> import glob
>>> glob.glob('*.gif')
['card.gif']
>>> glob.glob('.c*')
['.card.gif']