partial / wildcard string match in 'in' and 'list.index()'

[Jon Perez]

For a given list:

fruits=["apples","oranges","mangoes","bananas"]


Is it possible to do wildcard matches like shown below?

1. "man*" in fruits

2. fruits.index("man*")

3. "*nanas*" in fruits

4. fruits.index("*nanas")

or is there any way to achieve an equivalent effect
short of doing a while loop?

[Peter Otten]

Jon Perez wrote:

For a given list:

fruits=["apples","oranges","mangoes","bananas"]


Is it possible to do wildcard matches like shown below?

1. "man*" in fruits

2. fruits.index("man*")

3. "*nanas*" in fruits

4. fruits.index("*nanas")

or is there any way to achieve an equivalent effect
short of doing a while loop?

import fnmatch
def find(seq, pattern): .... pattern = pattern.lower()
.... for i, n in enumerate(seq):
.... if fnmatch.fnmatch(n.lower(), pattern):
.... return i
.... return -1
.... def index(seq, pattern): .... result = find(seq, pattern)
.... if result == -1:
.... raise ValueError
.... return result
.... def contains(seq, pattern): .... return find(seq, pattern) != -1
.... fruit = "apples oranges mangoes bananas".split()
contains(fruit, "man*") True contains(fruit, "*nas") True index(fruit, "*ANA*") 3 find(fruit, "*") 0 find(fruit, "m*s") 2 find(fruit, "m*x") -1

If you want case-sensitive matches, use fnmatchcase() and remove the
..lower() conversions.

Peter