pattern-based string expansion

[sue]

I'm not looking for all possible strings with a wildcard,
just a pseudo-RE-based expansion.  The RE would not support
open-ended arguments (* or +), but would have ?,[] and so
on.
The expansion needs to be ordered.

I've thought about hacking the glob(3) code to work on an
input RE, but I was hoping this already existed somewhere.

I have csh scripts which generate a set of strings, and then
operate on the string sets. (The strings are NOT filenames,
csh doesn't actually care.)  I'd like to move them over to
Python, but until I can get expansions, I'm stuck.

I didn't see an expansion utility in "Understanding REs".
Everything I've seen so far is focused on matching or
reducing strings.

Sue.