Question

Is there a simple way to support wildcards (‘*’) when searching strings – without using RegEx?

Users are supposed to enter search terms using wildcards, but should not have to deal with the complexity of RegEx:

'foo*'   =>  str.startswith('foo') '*foo'   =>  str.endswith('foo') '*foo*'  =>  'foo' in str 

(it gets more complicated when there are multiple search terms though, e.g. ‘foobarbaz’)

This seems like a common issue, so I wonder whether there’s a ready-made solution for it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You could try the fnmatch module, it’s got a shell-like wildcard syntax.