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, Oct 26 '08 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, Apr 27 '11 at 05:01

score 14 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 26 '08 at 20:54

14

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

answered Oct 26 '08 at 20:54

Greg Hewgill

1 Answers1