permissive equality test on string

Question

Hi, I'm a python newbie with a problem too hard to tackle.

I have a string defining a path, were all the spaces have been converted to underscores. How can I find if it corresponds to a real path?

e.g. a string like /some/path_to/directory_1/and_to/directory_2
with a real path: /some/path_to/directory 1/and_to/directory 2

notice that the real path can contain BOTH spaces and underscores.

How can I feed it to os.path.exists() ???

thanks alessandro

Answer 1

Use glob but replacing every underscore with a range [ _]:

import glob
glob.glob('/some/path_to/directory_1/and_to/directory_2'.replace('_', '[ _]'))

Note that this will fail if your path contains the character [. You can fix this by first replacing [ with [[].