Skip to content

Wildcard Match

Overview

Wildcard Match provides an enhanced fnmatch, glob, and pathlib library in order to provide file matching and globbing that more closely follows the features found in Bash. In some ways these libraries are similar to Python's builtin libraries as they provide a similar interface to match, filter, and glob the file system. But they also include a number of features found in Bash's globbing such as backslash escaping, brace expansion, extended glob pattern groups, etc. They also add a number of new useful functions as well, such as globmatch which functions like fnmatch, but for paths.

Wildcard Match also adds a file search utility called wcmatch that is built on top of fnmatch and globmatch. It was originally written for Rummage, but split out into this project to be used by other projects that may find its approach useful.

Bash is used as a guide when making decisions on behavior for fnmatch and glob. Behavior may differ from Bash version to Bash version, but an attempt is made to keep Wildcard Match up with the latest relevant changes. With all of this said, there may be a few corner cases in which we've intentionally chosen to not exactly mirror Bash. If an issue is found where Wildcard Match seems to deviate in an illogical way, we'd love to hear about it in the issue tracker.

Features

A quick overview of Wildcard Match's Features:

  • Provides an interface comparable to Python's builtin in fnmatch, glob, and pathlib.
  • Allows for a much more configurable experience when matching or globbing with many more features.
  • Adds support for ** in glob.
  • Adds support for Zsh style *** recursive glob for symlinks.
  • Adds support for escaping characters with \.
  • Add support for POSIX style character classes inside sequences: [[:alnum:]], etc. The C locale is used.
  • Adds support for brace expansion: a{b,{c,d}} → ab ac ad.
  • Adds support for expanding ~ or ~username to the appropriate user path.
  • Adds support for extended match patterns: @(...), +(...), *(...), ?(...), and !(...).
  • Adds ability to match path names via the path centric globmatch.
  • Provides a pathlib variant that uses Wildcard Match's glob library instead of Python's default.
  • Provides an alternative file crawler called wcmatch.
  • And more…

Installation

Installation is easy with pip:

$ pip install wcmatch

Libraries

  • fnmatch: A file name matching library.
  • glob: A file system searching and file path matching library.
  • pathlib: A implementation of Python's pathlib that uses our own glob implementation.
  • wcmatch: An alternative file search library built on fnmatch and globmatch.