[Python-ideas] fnmatch.filter_false

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Thu May 18 09:00:42 EDT 2017


On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 12:07:05AM -0400, tritium-list at sdamon.com wrote:

> > At the cost of a slight inefficiency, you could use the pure Python
> > equivalent given in the docs:
> > 
> > https://docs.python.org/3/library/fnmatch.html#fnmatch.filter
> > 
> > 
> > fnmatch.filter(names, pattern)
> > 
> >     Return the subset of the list of names that match pattern. It is
> >     the same as [n for n in names if fnmatch(n, pattern)], but implemented
> >     more efficiently.
> > 
> > So your filter_false is:
> > 
> >     [n for n in names if not fnmatch(n, pattern)]
> > 
> > which avoids the need for the copy-and-paste anti-pattern.
> 
> I ran a test on the same dataset using listcomps.  The modified version of
> filter is still 22.<some noise>, the unmodified version is still 19.<some
> noise>.  However the listcomp method is 41.<some noise>.  That performance
> is important, at least to me.

41 what? Nanoseconds? Hours? For how many files? *wink*

In any case, are you running on Linux or Unix? If so, try replacing the 
fnmatch with fnmatchcase, since that avoids calling os.path.normcase (a 
no-op on Linux) twice for each file.

If you want to reduce the number of function calls even more, try this 
untested code:

# using an implementation detail is a bit naughty
match = fnmatch._compile_pattern(pattern).match
results = [n for n in names if match(n) is None]




-- 
Steve


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