file_directory_access.md

File and Directory Access

pathlib — Object-oriented filesystem paths

Path

cwd home stat chmod exists expanduser glob group is_dir is_file is_mount is_symlink is_socket is_fifo is_block_device is_char_device iterdir lchmod lstat mkdir open owner read_bytes read_text rename replace resolve rglob rmdir samefile symlink_to touch unlink link_to write_bytes write_text

os.path — Common pathname manipulations

fileinput — Iterate over lines from multiple input streams

stat — Interpreting stat() results

filecmp — File and Directory Comparisons

tempfile — Generate temporary files and directories

glob — Unix style pathname pattern expansion

fnmatch — Unix filename pattern matching

The re module supports more advanced matching, but a lot of the time simpler wildcard matching of strings ("*" for multiple characters or "?" for a single character) is adequate.

Although this module is listed under "File and Directory Access", this can be used for many things.

import re
import fnmatch

# Case-insensitive match: fnmatch
print(fnmatch.fnmatch("Dog", "do*")) # -> True
print(fnmatch.fnmatch("cat", "do*")) # -> False

# Case-sensitive match: fnmatchsensitive
print(fnmatch.fnmatchcase("Dog", "do*")) # -> False
print(fnmatch.fnmatchcase("dog", "do*")) # -> True

# Case-insensitive match in list: filter
print(fnmatch.filter(["Dog", "cat"], "do*")) # -> ["Dog"]

# Convert pattern to regular expression string: translate
pattern = fnmatch.translate("quick*")
print(pattern) # -> (?s:quick.*)\Z
re_inst = re.compile(pattern, re.IGNORECASE)
print(re_inst.match('quickly')) # -> <_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(0, 7), match='quickly'>

linecache — Random access to text lines

shutil — High-level file operations