.gitignore style fnmatch()

Question

What would be the simplest way to have .gitignore style fnmatch() with Python. Looks like that stdlib does not provide a match() function which would match a path spec against an UNIX style path regex.

• fnmatch() matches only pure filenames, no paths http://docs.python.org/library/fnmatch.html?highlight=fnmatch#fnmatch

• glob() will perform directory listing, and does not provide match() true/false style function http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/glob.html?highlight=glob#glob.glob

.gitignore have both paths and files with wildcards to be (black)listed

• https://github.com/miohtama/Krusovice/blob/master/.gitignore

• http://linux.die.net/man/5/gitignore

Answer 1

If you want to use mixed UNIX wildcard patterns as listed in your .gitignore example, why not just take each pattern and use fnmatch.translate with re.search?

import fnmatch
import re

s = '/path/eggs/foo/bar'
pattern = "eggs/*"

re.search(fnmatch.translate(pattern), s)
# <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x10049e988>

translate turns the wildcard pattern into a re pattern

Hidden UNIX files:

s = '/path/to/hidden/.file'
isHiddenFile = re.search(fnmatch.translate('.*'), s)
if not isHiddenFile:
    # do something with it

Answer 2

There's now a library called pathspec which implements the full .gitignore specification, including things like **/*.py; the documentation doesn't describe the options in detail but says that it is git compatible, and the code handles them.

>>> import pathspec
>>> spec_src = '**/*.pyc'
>>> spec = pathspec.PathSpec.from_lines(pathspec.patterns.GitWildMatchPattern,, spec_src.splitlines())
>>> set(spec.match_files({"test.py", "test.pyc", "deeper/file.pyc", "even/deeper/file.pyc"}))
set(['test.pyc', 'even/deeper/file.pyc', 'deeper/file.pyc'])
>>> set(spec.match_tree("pathspec/"))
set(['__init__.pyc', 'gitignore.pyc', 'util.pyc', 'pattern.pyc', 'tests/__init__.pyc', 'tests/test_gitignore.pyc', 'compat.pyc', 'pathspec.pyc'])