Ignore case in glob() on Linux

Question

I'm writing a script which will have to work on directories which are modified by hand by Windows and Linux users alike. The Windows users tend to not care at all about case in assigning filenames.

Is there a way to handle this on the Linux side in Python, i.e. can I get a case-insensitive, glob-like behaviour?

Answer 1

You can replace each alphabetic character c with [cC], via

import glob
def insensitive_glob(pattern):
    def either(c):
        return '[%s%s]' % (c.lower(), c.upper()) if c.isalpha() else c
    return glob.glob(''.join(map(either, pattern)))

Answer 2

Use case-insensitive regexes instead of glob patterns. fnmatch.translate generates a regex from a glob pattern, so

re.compile(fnmatch.translate(pattern), re.IGNORECASE)

gives you a case-insensitive version of a glob pattern as a compiled RE.

Keep in mind that, if the filesystem is hosted by a Linux box on a Unix-like filesystem, users will be able to create files foo, Foo and FOO in the same directory.

Answer 3

Non recursively

In order to retrieve the files (and files only) of a directory "path", with "globexpression":

list_path = [i for i in os.listdir(path) if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(path, i))]
result = [os.path.join(path, j) for j in list_path if re.match(fnmatch.translate(globexpression), j, re.IGNORECASE)]

Recursively

with walk:

result = []
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(path, topdown=True):
    result += [os.path.join(root, j) for j in files \
        if re.match(fnmatch.translate(globexpression), j, re.IGNORECASE)]

Better also compile the regular expression, so instead of

re.match(fnmatch.translate(globexpression)

do (before the loop):

reg_expr = re.compile(fnmatch.translate(globexpression), re.IGNORECASE)

and then replace in the loop:

result += [os.path.join(root, j) for j in files if re.match(reg_expr, j)]

Answer 4

Starting from python-3.12, you can use Path.glob(pattern, *, case_sensitive=None) API with case_sensitive argument set to False to get the desired behavior.

By default, or when the case_sensitive keyword-only argument is set to None, this method matches paths using platform-specific casing rules: typically, case-sensitive on POSIX, and case-insensitive on Windows. Set case_sensitive to True or False to override this behaviour.

Answer 5

Here is my non-recursive file search for Python with glob like behavior for Python 3.5+

# Eg: find_files('~/Downloads', '*.Xls', ignore_case=True)
def find_files(path: str, glob_pat: str, ignore_case: bool = False):
    rule = re.compile(fnmatch.translate(glob_pat), re.IGNORECASE) if ignore_case \
            else re.compile(fnmatch.translate(glob_pat))
    return [n for n in os.listdir(os.path.expanduser(path)) if rule.match(n)]

Note: This version handles home directory expansion

Answer 6

Depending on your case, you might use .lower() on both file pattern and results from folder listing and only then compare the pattern with the filename

Answer 7

Riffing off of @Timothy C. Quinn's answer, this modification allows the use of wildcards anywhere in the path. This is admittedly only case insensitive for the glob_pat argument.

import re
import os
import fnmatch
import glob

def find_files(path: str, glob_pat: str, ignore_case: bool = False):
    rule = re.compile(fnmatch.translate(glob_pat), re.IGNORECASE) if ignore_case \
            else re.compile(fnmatch.translate(glob_pat))
    return [n for n in glob.glob(os.path.join(path, '*')) if rule.match(n)]

Answer 8

Here is a working example with fnmatch.translate():

from glob import glob
from pathlib import Path
import fnmatch, re


mask_str = '"*_*_yyww.TXT" | "*_yyww.TXT" | "*_*_yyww_*.TXT" | "*_yyww_*.TXT"'
masks_list = ["yyyy", "yy", "mmmmm", "mmm", "mm", "#d", "#w", "#m", "ww"]

for mask_item in masks_list:
    mask_str = mask_str.replace(mask_item, "*")

clean_quotes_and_spaces = mask_str.replace(" ", "").replace('"', '')
remove_double_star = clean_quotes_and_spaces.replace("**", "*")
masks = remove_double_star.split("|")

cwd = Path.cwd()

files = list(cwd.glob('*'))
print(files)

files_found = set()

for mask in masks:
    mask = re.compile(fnmatch.translate(mask), re.IGNORECASE)
    print(mask)

    for file in files:        
        if mask.match(str(file)):
            files_found.add(file)         

print(files_found)

Answer 9

I just wanted a variant of this where I only went case insensitive if I was specifying a file extension -- eg, I wanted ".jpg" and ".JPG" to be crawled the same. This is my variant:

import re
import glob
import os
from fnmatch import translate as regexGlob
from platform import system as getOS

def linuxGlob(globPattern:str) -> frozenset:
    """
    Glob with a case-insensitive file extension
    """
    base = set(glob.glob(globPattern, recursive= True))
    maybeExt = os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(globPattern))[1][1:]
    caseChange = set()
    # Now only try the extended insensitivity if we've got a file extension
    if len(maybeExt) > 0 and getOS() != "Windows":
        rule = re.compile(regexGlob(globPattern), re.IGNORECASE)
        endIndex = globPattern.find("*")
        if endIndex == -1:
            endIndex = len(globPattern)
        crawl = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(globPattern[:endIndex]), "**", "*")
        checkSet = set(glob.glob(crawl, recursive= True)) - base
        caseChange = set([x for x in checkSet if rule.match(x)])
    return frozenset(base.union(caseChange))

I didn't actually restrict the insensitivity to just the extension because I was lazy, but that confusion space is pretty small (eg, you'd want to capture FOO.jpg and FOO.JPG but not foo.JPG or foo.jpg; if your path is that pathological you've got other problems)

Answer 10

def insensitive_glob(pattern):
    def either(c):
        return '[%s%s]' % (c.lower(), c.upper()) if c.isalpha() else c
    return glob.glob(''.join(map(either, pattern)))

also can be:

def insensitive_glob(pattern):
    return glob.glob(
        ''.join([
            '[' + c.lower() + c.upper() + ']'
            if c.isalpha() else c
            for c in pattern
        ])
    )

Answer 11

a variation of your answer with search recursive of names files :

def insensitive_for_glob(string_file):
    return ''.join(['[' + c.lower() + c.upper() + ']' if c.isalpha() else c for c in string_file])

in otherplace in code :

namefile = self.insensitive_for_glob(namefile)
lst_found_file = glob.glob(f'{file_path}/**/*{namefile}', recursive=True)

Answer 12

You can simply search for upper and lower cases and then add the results like so:

from pathlib import Path folder = Path('some_folder')
file_filter = '.txt' 
files_in_folder = [files for files in (
    list(folder.glob(f'*{file_filter.lower()}'))+
    list(folder.glob(f'*{file_filter.upper()}'))
)]

This will find files both with .txt as well as .TXT endings.