partial / wildcard string match in 'in' and 'list.index()'

[Patrick Hall]

Hi,

> For a given list:
> fruits=["apples","oranges","mangoes","bananas"]
>
> Is it possible to do wildcard matches like shown below?
> 1. "man*" in fruits
> 2. fruits.index("man*")
> 3. "*nanas*" in fruits
> 4. fruits.index("*nanas")

I'm not sure if this is what you had in mind, but you can use list
comprehensions:

fruits=["apples","oranges","mangoes","bananas"]
import re
1. [fruit for fruit in fruits if re.match("man.*",fruit)]
2. [fruits.index(fruit) for fruit in fruits if re.match("man.*",fruit)]
3. [fruit for fruit in fruits if re.match(r".*an.*",fruit)]
4. [fruits.index(fruit) for fruit in fruits if re.match("man*",fruit)]

Note also that I think you're looking for
.*
instead of just
*
in your regular expressions.

> or is there any way to achieve an equivalent effect
> short of doing a while loop?

I personally am not so sure a while loop wouldn't be clearer in this
case -- things like "fruit for fruit in fruits" are pretty unreadable
to me. 

Cheers,
Pat