text matching help

[Heiko Wundram]

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

For documentation on the wildcards accepted by fnmatch.fnmatch, use

help(fnmatch)

in an interactive console window after you have imported the module.

HTH!

Heiko.