相当于Tcl的“字符串匹配”的Python

Question

I am looking for Python equivalent to the Tcl's string match operation. Specifically, I would like to handle correctly the special sequences (*, ?, and [chars]).

For example, given three Python strings:

expected = 'Foo? Bar* Tar'
actual1 = 'Foo2 Barfluff Tar'
actual2 = 'Foo Bar Tar'

the match operation match(expected,actual1) should return true, but match(expected,actual2) should return false.

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

You want the fnmatch module . While re provides full powered regular expressions, fnmatch performs the limited, shell-style globbing wildcard matching you're looking for.

For a case sensitive match, it's as simple as:

>>> fnmatch.fnmatchcase(actual1, expected)
True
>>> fnmatch.fnmatchcase(actual2, expected)
False

If you want to follow the operating system's case sensitivity rules (that is, insensitive on Windows, sensitive on most other operating systems), you'd use plain fnmatch.fnmatch to invoke automatic case normalization.