
``fnmatch`` --- Unix filename pattern matching
**********************************************

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*   |
+--------------+--------------------------------------+

Note that the filename separator (``'/'`` on Unix) is *not* special to
this module.  See module ``glob`` for pathname expansion (``glob``
uses ``fnmatch()`` 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.  If the operating system is case-
   insensitive, then both parameters will be normalized to all lower-
   or upper-case before the comparison is performed.  If you require a
   case-sensitive comparison regardless of whether that's standard for
   your operating system, use ``fnmatchcase()`` instead.

   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.

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.

   Example:

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

See also:

   Module ``glob``
      Unix shell-style path expansion.
