python glob matching patterns

Question

I am looking at the glob man page and I cannot make the matching patterns work in python. I have this so far...

glob.glob('file.*') + glob.glob('file[0-9].*')

and this works and return me a list as long as the file numbers o not exceed 9. If I make a file100.txt it does not work, and if I try the range [0-100] or [0-1000] it does not change anything...

So my question is how can I make this match any number....and also how can I combine it into one statement, it seems like it should be once statement.

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure glob isn't expressive enough to do what you want, so I suggest fetching more than you need and then filtering. Eg (untested)

import re

file_names = [name for name in glob.glob('file*.*') if re.match(r'^file\d*\.', name]

Answer 2

Ordinary globbing doesn't handle that type of thing. You can't specify repetitions of specific patterns of characters. You won't be able to do it with a single call. Your best bet is to just use file*.txt , and then post-process the resulting list to eliminate ones not matching your pattern, for instance by using regular expressions functions in the re module.