71 – File discovery by name pattern

71 – File discovery by name pattern#

When you need to find files based on a name pattern, you can use the method glob from pathlib.Path. Note that glob doesn’t support complex (regex) patterns, though.

Suppose the filesystem contains the following folder Downloads and its given contents:

= Downloads/
  - cat_and_dog.png
  - cute_cat.jpg
  - cute_dog.jpg
  - two_cats.png

Then, the snippet below finds all files with the string “cat” in the name:

from pathlib import Path

cat_files = Path("Downloads").glob("*cat*")
# Finds cat_and_dog.png, cute_cat.jpg, two_cats.png

Similarly, the snippet below finds all files that end with “.jpg”:

from pathlib import Path

jpg_imgs = Path("Downloads").glob("*.jpg")
# Finds cute_cat.jpg, cute_dog.jpg

Note that the method glob produces the file paths in an arbitrary order.