> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Steven D'Aprano > <ste...@remove.this.cybersource.com.au> wrote: >> On Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:20:14 -0700, Chris Rebert wrote: >> > On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Someone Something >> > <fordhai...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I'm trying to write a program that needs reg expressions in the >> >> following way. If the user types in "*something*" that means that the >> >> asterixes can be replaced by any string of letters. I haven't been able >> >> to find any reg expression tutorials that I can understand. Help? >> > >> > Sounds like you only need globbing >> > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_%28programming%29) as opposed to full >> > regexes. >> > Simple wildcard globbing can be trivially done by replacing the *s in >> > the string with ".*", like so: >> > >> > *something* ===> .*something.* >> >> Or just use the glob and fnmatch modules. > On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Someone Something <fordhai...@gmail.com> wrote: > how can I implement this in python?
Please don't top-post. If you only need to check whether a string matches a pattern or not: if fnmatch.fnmatch(string_to_check, search_query_with_wildcards): do_whatever() For more complicated stuff, there's fnmatch.translate(), which can generate the equivalent regular expression. http://docs.python.org/library/fnmatch.html#fnmatch.translate Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list