On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 12:08:06PM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 11:57 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Sun, Jan 04, 2015 at 06:10:01PM -0500, random832@fastmail.us wrote: [...]
Right now, none of this is done. If you pass *.txt on the command line to a python script, it will attempt to open a file called "*.txt".
On Windows, you will get Python's definition of globbing. On POSIX systems, the globbing module will do nothing, because the shell will most likely have already expanded the wild-cards
You're assuming that there are no wildcard characters actually included in the file names, which on Unix systems is perfectly possible. How can you reliably manipulate a file called *.txt when there are foo.txt and bar.txt in the same directory? With most Unix programs, you escape the asterisk to get it past the shell, the program does no globbing of its own, and you're safe. If your Python script unconditionally globs its file names, you're stuck.
You seem to be right. With double wildcard expansion (by the shell and by the python script) there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to get just the file name with the wildcard in it: [steve@ando junk]$ cat testglob.py import sys import glob for arg in sys.argv[1:]: print(arg + ":-") for name in glob.glob(arg): print(" " + name) [steve@ando junk]$ ls eggs.jpg *.jpg testglob.py [steve@ando junk]$ python3.3 testglob.py *.jpg eggs.jpg:- eggs.jpg *.jpg:- eggs.jpg *.jpg [steve@ando junk]$ python3.3 testglob.py \*.jpg *.jpg:- eggs.jpg *.jpg [steve@ando junk]$ python3.3 testglob.py \\*.jpg \*.jpg:- I guess the simple solutions are to either do a platform check first, or to provide a --no-glob command-line switch to turn globbing off. But I guess people won't think of that until its reported as a bug :-)
Another separate but related issue is the fact that windows wildcards do not behave in the same way as python glob patterns.
I don't understand why you say this. As I understand it, there is no such thing as "Windows wildcards" as every application which wants to support wildcards has to implement their own. If you want to know what kinds of globbing wildcards the application supports, you have to read the application documentation. (Or guess.)
I am not a Windows expert, so I may have been misinformed. Anyone care to comment?
There's a very standard interpretation, which I think is codified in the FindFirstFile API, although I'm not sure of the details.
Do all Windows apps call FindFirstFile?
and left bracket is a valid character in filenames unlike ? and *.
And on POSIX systems, *all* wildcards are valid characters in file names. If you want to specify a file called literally "*.txt", or "spam[and eggs?].jpg", you have to escape the wildcards. Windows is no different.
No, Windows *is* different, because you simply aren't allowed to have those characters in file names:
I know that. The point that Random raised is that some wildcards are legal in Windows file names. Yes, and *all* wildcards are legal in POSIX filenames, so whatever problems we have with escaping are going to occur on both platforms, as you have already pointed out above. In any case, having a platform specific globbing module is looking more and more useful. Does this need a PEP? -- Steven