Question

I am having some difficulty writing a function that will search through a directory for a file that matches a specific regular expression (which I have compiled using ‘re.compile’). So my question is: How do I search through a directory (I plan to use os.walk) for a file that matches a specific regular expression? An example would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This will find all files starting with two digits and ending in gif, you can add the files into a global list, if you wish:

import re import os r = re.compile(r'\d{2}.+gif$') for root, dirs, files in os.walk('/home/vinko'):   l = [os.path.join(root,x) for x in files if r.match(x)]   if l: print l #Or append to a global list, whatever