Python glob but against a list of strings rather than the filesystem

Question

I want to be able to match a pattern in glob format to a list of strings, rather than to actual files in the filesystem. Is there any way to do this, or convert a glob

Answer 1

While fnmatch.fnmatch can be used directly to check whether a pattern matches a filename or not, you can also use the fnmatch.translate method to generate the regex out of the given fnmatch pattern:

>>> import fnmatch
>>> fnmatch.translate('*.txt')
'.*\\.txt\\Z(?ms)'

From the documenation:

fnmatch.translate(pattern)

Return the shell-style pattern converted to a regular expression.