How can I support wildcards in user-defined search strings in Python?

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!

For asking normal programming questions, please don't mark your question as "community wiki". Nobody (including you) gets any reputation for that kind of question. I see you're new here, so no worries, just keep that in mind for next time. — Greg Hewgill
– Greg Hewgill, Commented Oct 26, 2008 at 21:03
First off, its regular expressions. Second, wouldn't it be easy enough to escape anything in the input that needs escaping for regex, turn * into .* and run it through the regex module? — Aaron Dufour
– Aaron Dufour, Commented Apr 27, 2011 at 5:01

Greg Hewgill · Accepted Answer · 2008-10-26 20:54:30Z

14

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

answered Oct 26, 2008 at 20:54

community wiki

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

1 Answer 1