Code Comments

Let’s say you are trying to retrieve the names of a bunch of files in a given directory that match a specific pattern. You can do this pretty easily at the command line using a command such as the following in Windows.

dir *.txt

Or something like this in Linux:

ls *.txt

But if you want to do this programmatically with Python, you have to do it a little differently. Fortunately, this is very easy using a library that is built into Python (at least in later versions) called glob. It does the wildcard functionality for you. Below is a simple code sample on how you can do this.

import glob
 
fileNames = glob.glob("C:\\Temp\\*.txt")
print fileNames

This would give you an output such as the following:

['C:\\Temp\\File1.txt', 'C:\\Temp\\File2.txt', 'C:\\Temp\\File3.txt']