Donate via PayPal Coverage Status PyPI Version PyPI Downloads PyPI - Python Version License

Wildcard Match

[!warning] Security Considerations

Wildcard Match translates the more simple, path-centric syntax of glob patterns to regular expression for the purpose of iterating and matching file systems.

Regular expression engines like those in JavaScript, Python, Java, etc. choose compatibility and expressiveness over guaranteed performance, accepting the risk of catastrophic backtracking when patterns contain nested quantifiers or overlapping alternations.

ReDoS (regular expression Denial of Service) cases are those that specifically target the areas where a regular expression engine does not guarantee optimal performance.

Because Wildcard Match builds its matching upon the Python regular expression engine, it can take advantage of the engine's power, but it is also susceptible the engine's weaknesses.

Learn more here, and be thoughtful about what you provide to this library in production systems.

Overview

Wildcard Match translates the more simple, path-centric syntax of glob patterns to regular expression for the purpose of iterating and matching file systems.

Wildcard Match provides an enhanced fnmatch, glob, and pathlib library in order to provide file matching and globbing that more closely follows the features found in Bash. In some ways these libraries are similar to Python's builtin libraries as they provide a similar interface to match, filter, and glob the file system. But they also include a number of features found in Bash's globbing such as backslash escaping, brace expansion, extended glob pattern groups, etc. They also add a number of new useful functions as well, such as globmatch which functions like fnmatch, but for paths.

Wildcard Match also adds a file search utility called wcmatch that is built on top of fnmatch and globmatch. It was originally written for Rummage, but split out into this project to be used by other projects that may find its approach useful.

Bash is used as a guide when making decisions on behavior for fnmatch and glob. Behavior may differ from Bash version to Bash version, but an attempt is made to keep Wildcard Match up with the latest relevant changes. With all of this said, there may be a few corner cases in which we've intentionally chosen to not exactly mirror Bash. If an issue is found where Wildcard Match seems to deviate in an illogical way, we'd love to hear about it in the issue tracker.

Features

A quick overview of Wildcard Match's Features:

  • Provides an interface comparable to Python's builtin in fnmatch, glob, and pathlib.
  • Allows for a much more configurable experience when matching or globbing with many more features.
  • Adds support for ** in glob.
  • Adds support for Zsh style *** recursive glob for symlinks.
  • Adds support for escaping characters with \.
  • Add support for POSIX style character classes inside sequences: [[:alnum:]], etc. The C locale is used.
  • Adds support for brace expansion: a{b,{c,d}} --> ab ac ad.
  • Adds support for expanding ~ or ~username to the appropriate user path.
  • Adds support for extended match patterns: @(...), +(...), *(...), ?(...), and !(...).
  • Adds ability to match path names via the path centric globmatch.
  • Provides a pathlib variant that uses Wildcard Match's glob library instead of Python's default.
  • Provides an alternative file crawler called wcmatch.
  • And more...

Installation

Installation is easy with pip:

pip install wcmatch

Documentation

https://facelessuser.github.io/wcmatch/

License

MIT

Project links

Data verified by PyPI on Aug 14, 2026
Data provided by the project maintainers, verified at the time the release was uploaded to PyPI.

Key dates

PyPI data
Data sourced directly from PyPI's database.
  • Released:
Latest release

1 maintainer

PyPI data
Data sourced directly from PyPI's database.
Avatar for facelessuser from gravatar.com facelessuser

Credits

Author: Isaac Muse

GitHub Statistics

Data verified by PyPI on Aug 14, 2026
The GitHub source repository was provided by the project maintainers and verified by PyPI at the time of upload. Stars, forks, and open issues/PRs are derived from that repository and have not been independently verified.

License expression

MIT
View SPDX License List

Requires

Python >=3.10

Tags

fnmatch glob search wildcard

Classifiers

Report project as malware

Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

wcmatch-11.0.1.tar.gz (144.7 kB view details)

Uploaded Source

Built Distribution

If you're not sure about the file name format, learn more about wheel file names.

wcmatch-11.0.1-py3-none-any.whl (43.4 kB view details)

Uploaded Python 3

File details

Details for the file wcmatch-11.0.1.tar.gz.

File metadata

  • Download URL: wcmatch-11.0.1.tar.gz
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 144.7 kB
  • Tags: Source
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? Yes
  • Uploaded via: twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14

File hashes

Hashes for wcmatch-11.0.1.tar.gz
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 1ea2b4fa678b8ca268253798d5963935df39132d47c3e241c0a0732224005e7d
MD5 207a217a68cb22f1c9f9ec741db1d0e5
BLAKE2b-256 574330e407989e313677dbb9d5f045f966549a7254834571e342eaa4b55cc67b

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

The following attestation bundles were made for wcmatch-11.0.1.tar.gz:

Publisher: deploy.yml on facelessuser/wcmatch

Attestations: Values shown here reflect the state when the release was signed and may no longer be current.

File details

Details for the file wcmatch-11.0.1-py3-none-any.whl.

File metadata

  • Download URL: wcmatch-11.0.1-py3-none-any.whl
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 43.4 kB
  • Tags: Python 3
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? Yes
  • Uploaded via: twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14

File hashes

Hashes for wcmatch-11.0.1-py3-none-any.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 fd149ecddb9f0a88ea780017d6dde17c994e494e7f7303d4e3c9d6251f978f4b
MD5 f23e4fafb3b18e5e57f82a3d653da86c
BLAKE2b-256 ce777a02b0f05b3ffcdbef9719ce3ee0b508d6a29b58e95299f1580055671db3

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

The following attestation bundles were made for wcmatch-11.0.1-py3-none-any.whl:

Publisher: deploy.yml on facelessuser/wcmatch

Attestations: Values shown here reflect the state when the release was signed and may no longer be current.

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

This release

11.0.1 This release

2 files

11.0

2 files

10.2.1

2 files

10.2

2 files

10.1

2 files

10.0

2 files

9.0

2 files

8.5.2

2 files

8.5.1

2 files

8.5

2 files

8.4.1

2 files

8.4

2 files

8.3

2 files

8.2

2 files

8.1.2

2 files

8.1.1

2 files

8.1

2 files

8.0.1

2 files

8.0

2 files

7.2

2 files

7.1

2 files

7.0.1

2 files

7.0

2 files

6.1

2 files

6.0.3

2 files

6.0.2

2 files

6.0.1

2 files

6.0

2 files

5.1

2 files

5.0.3

2 files

5.0.2

2 files

5.0.1

2 files

5.0

2 files

4.3.1

2 files

4.3

2 files

4.2

2 files

4.1

2 files

4.0.1

2 files

4.0

2 files

3.0.2

2 files

3.0.1

2 files

3.0

2 files

2.2.1

2 files

2.2

2 files

2.1

2 files

2.0.3

2 files

2.0.2

2 files

2.0.1

2 files

2.0

2 files

1.0.2

2 files

1.0.1

2 files

1.0

2 files

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page