strings with wildcards matching

Question

Hi all

I need to match two strings with simple wildcards:

"oh.my.*" matches "*.my.life", "oh.my.goodness" and "*.*.*", but not "in.my.house"

The only wildcard is *, which substitutes string of any character (minus .)

I thought of using fnmatch, but it does not accept wildcards in file name.

There is some code with regex which i am using now - something simpler would be better, i guess:

def notify(self, event, message):
    events = []
    r = re.compile(event.replace('.','\.').replace('*','[^\.]+'))
    for e in self._events:
        if r.match(e):
            events.append(e)
        else:
            if e.find('*')>-1:
                r2 = re.compile(e.replace('.','\.').replace('*','[^\.]+'))
                if r2.match(event):
                    events.append(e)
    for event in events:
        for callback in self._events[event]:
            callback(self, message)

Answer 1

This should work for you:

def is_match(a, b):
    aa = a.split('.')
    bb = b.split('.')
    if len(aa) != len(bb): return False
    for x, y in zip(aa, bb):
        if not (x == y or x == '*' or y == '*'): return False
    return True

How it works:

• First split the inputs on ..
• If the arguments have a different number of components then fail immediately.
• Otherwise iterate over the components and check for equality.
• If either component is a * this also counts as a successful match.
• If any component fails to match return False, otherwise return True.