How does the star * behave in Python's regex vs. glob pattern search?

Question

I am trying to understand how glob works, also how is the star * related to glob and how it works vs. how it works in regex?

For example, I know glob.glob("C:UsersMeMyFolder*.txt") would match and return any files with the extension .txt in the given path but how would that compare to finding text files using Regex? Is one better in performance than the other? higher speed or less computation memory?

Asked By: Archeologist

||

Source

Answer 1

If we are talking about a ‘*’ in the pattern, then, typically * just means “match any number of characters” or better “match 0 or more characters”, so if we assume we have files in a directory: apple cherry custard green_apple then you can get lists of files for example:

import glob

print("glob.glob('a*') -> {}".format(glob.glob('a*'))) # match starting with 'a'

print("glob.glob('*a*') -> {}".format(glob.glob('*a*'))) # match anything that contains an 'a'

print("glob.glob('apple*') -> {}".format(glob.glob('apple*'))) # match if starts with 'apple'

print("glob.glob('*apple*') -> {}".format(glob.glob('*apple*'))) # match if 'apple' is in the filename

This would return

glob.glob('a*') -> ['apple']
glob.glob('*a*') -> ['apple', 'custard', 'green_apple']
glob.glob('apple*') -> ['apple']
glob.glob('*apple*') -> ['apple', 'green_apple']

This is a very simplistic view of what you can do with glob.glob.

Answered By: brechmos

How does the star * behave in Python's regex vs. glob pattern search?

Question:

Answers: