Credit: Robin Parmar, Alex Martelli
You need to examine a directory, or an entire directory tree rooted in a certain directory, and obtain a list of all the files (and optionally folders) that match a certain pattern.
os.path.walk
is sufficient for this purpose, but we can pretty it up quite at bit:
import os.path, fnmatch def listFiles(root, patterns='*', recurse=1, return_folders=0): # Expand patterns from semicolon-separated string to list pattern_list = patterns.split(';') # Collect input and output arguments into one bunch class Bunch: def _ _init_ _(self, **kwds): self._ _dict_ _.update(kwds) arg = Bunch(recurse=recurse, pattern_list=pattern_list, return_folders=return_folders, results=[]) def visit(arg, dirname, files): # Append to arg.results all relevant files (and perhaps folders) for name in files: fullname = os.path.normpath(os.path.join(dirname, name)) if arg.return_folders or os.path.isfile(fullname): for pattern in arg.pattern_list: if fnmatch.fnmatch(name, pattern): arg.results.append(fullname) break # Block recursion if recursion was disallowed if not arg.recurse: files[:]=[] os.path.walk(root, visit, arg) return arg.results
The standard directory-tree function os.path.walk
is powerful and flexible, but it can be confusing to beginners. This
recipe dresses it up in a
listFiles
function that lets you choose the root folder, whether to recurse
down through subfolders, the file patterns to match, and whether to
include folder names in the result list.
The file patterns are case-insensitive but otherwise Unix-style, as
supplied by the standard fnmatch
module, which
this recipe uses. To specify multiple patterns, join them with a
semicolon. Note that this means that semicolons themselves
can’t be part of a pattern.
For example, you can easily get a list of all Python and HTML files
in directory /tmp
or any subdirectory thereof:
thefiles = listFiles('/tmp', '*.py;*.htm;*.html')