.gitignore style fnmatch()

Question

What would be the simplest way to have .gitignore style fnmatch() with Python. Looks like that stdlib does not provide a match() function which would match a path spec against an UNIX style path regex.

• fnmatch() matches only pure filenames, no paths http://docs.python.org/library/fnmatch.html?highlight=fnmatch#fnmatch

• glob() will perform directory listing, and does not provide match() true/false style function http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/glob.html?highlight=glob#glob.glob

.gitignore have both paths and files with wildcards to be (black)listed

• https://github.com/miohtama/Krusovice/blob/master/.gitignore

• http://linux.die.net/man/5/gitignore

Answer 1

If you want to use mixed UNIX wildcard patterns as listed in your .gitignore example, why not just take each pattern and use fnmatch.translate with re.search?

import fnmatch
import re

s = '/path/eggs/foo/bar'
pattern = "eggs/*"

re.search(fnmatch.translate(pattern), s)
# <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x10049e988>

translate turns the wildcard pattern into a re pattern

Hidden UNIX files:

s = '/path/to/hidden/.file'
isHiddenFile = re.search(fnmatch.translate('.*'), s)
if not isHiddenFile:
    # do something with it