Question

My program reads a field like *ABC* and tries to convert it into a glob statement.
I am having issues when trying to restrict the data.
Glob doesn’t work the same in linux bash vs python glob library:

From bash:

bash_level$ ls *FOO*V7*
baz_FOO_V7.txt  baz_FOO_V777.txt 
bash_level$ ls *FOO*V7[![:digit:]]* 
baz_FOO_V7.txt

From ipython:

In [1]: import glob
In [2]: glob.glob("*FOO*V7*.txt")
Out[2]: ['baz_FOO_V7.txt', 'baz_FOO_V777.txt']
In [3]: glob.glob("*FOO*V7[![:digit:]]*.txt")
Out[3]: []

Bottom line:
Out[3] hasn’t the same expected output.
How can I overcome this issue?

Many thanks

Answer 1

You could translate your glob expression into a regular expression:

import re
regex=re.compile(r'.*FOO.*V7[^\d].*\.txt')
print filter(lambda x: regex.match(x), glob.glob("*"))

Of course, at this point you no longer need glob as you could use os.listdir() instead.

EDIT

Reading the docs for glob and fnmatch (which is what glob uses to do matching), it appears that your match could be written as:

glob.glob('*FOO*V7[!0123456789]*')

as well.