text matching help

[Tim Williams]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Heiko Wundram" <heikowu at ceosg.de>


> Am Donnerstag, 9. September 2004 13:28 schrieb Tim Williams:
> > I need to be able to match some input text  to these wildcards  (eg
timothy
> > will match tim*),    * on its own is invalid,  there must be text before
or
> > after the *.
>
> Check out the fnmatch module (if you use simple wildcards, unix shell
style,
> which aren't regular expressions):
>
> >>> import fnmatch
> >>> fnmatch.fnmatch("mylittletext","my*")
> True
> >>> fnmatch.fnmatch("mylittletext","little*")
> False
> >>> fnmatch.fnmatch("mylittletext","*little*")
> True

Yes,  this does the trick,   many thanks.

I used something like

import fnmatch as f
t = 'tim.williams'

# in place of  L = MyDict.keys()
L = ['tim*' ,  'dav* ',  'david' ,  'peter' ,  '*m' , '*y' , ' not-a-name ',
'timoth?' , '*.*' , '*iams' , '*']

L.sort()  # to give a consistent search order

for name in L:
...  if f.fnmatch(t, name):
...   print t, 'matches', name

tim.williams matches *
tim.williams matches *.*
tim.williams matches *iams
tim.williams matches tim*

:-)