[Tutor] (no subject)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 08:29:22PM +0100, Selby Rowley Cannon wrote:
> OK, I have some code, and it uses glob.glob('*.py') to find all the 
> python files in the current directory.

That works because if you don't specify an absolute directory, the 
current directory is used. It does not look inside subdirectories.


> Just thought i'd ask, would:
> 
> glob.glob('C:\*.py') (Windows), or

By the way, that only works by accident. Backslashes are special in 
Python, and should be escaped like this:

'C:\\*.py'

or by using a raw string which turns off backslash interpretation:

r'C:\*.py'

or most easy of all, take advantage of Windows' feature that it allows 
you to use either backslashes or forward slashes:

'C:/*.py'

In your specific case, it works by accident because \* is interpreted as 
a literal backslash followed by an asterisk, but if you wrote something 
like 'C:\n*' hoping to find files that start with the letter "n", you 
would actually be looking for C : NEWLINE star instead.


> glob.glob('/*.py') (*nix)
> 
> find all the python files on the system? Thanks

No, because that specifies an absolute directory, but does not look 
inside subdirectories.

You can tell glob to look one, two, three... levels deep:

glob.glob('/*.py')
glob.glob('/*/*.py')
glob.glob('/*/*/*.py')

but there's no way to tell it to look all the way down, as far as it 
takes. For that sort of "recursive glob", you can use a combination of 
os.walk and the fnmatch module to do the same thing. Or look at the 
various solutions listed here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2186525/use-a-glob-to-find-files-recursively-in-python



-- 
Steven