glob exclude pattern

Question

I have a directory with a bunch of files inside: eee2314, asd3442 ... and eph.

I want to exclude all files that start with eph with the glob function.

How can I do it?

Answer 1

The pattern rules for glob are not regular expressions. Instead, they follow standard Unix path expansion rules. There are only a few special characters: two different wild-cards, and character ranges are supported [from pymotw: glob – Filename pattern matching].

So you can exclude some files with patterns.
For example to exclude manifests files (files starting with _) with glob, you can use:

files = glob.glob('files_path/[!_]*')

Answer 2

You can deduct sets and cast it back as a list:

list(set(glob("*")) - set(glob("eph*")))

Answer 3

You can't exclude patterns with the glob function, globs only allow for inclusion patterns. Globbing syntax is very limited (even a [!..] character class must match a character, so it is an inclusion pattern for every character that is not in the class).

You'll have to do your own filtering; a list comprehension usually works nicely here:

files = [fn for fn in glob('somepath/*.txt') 
         if not os.path.basename(fn).startswith('eph')]

Answer 4

Compared with glob, I recommend pathlib. Filtering one pattern is very simple.

from pathlib import Path

p = Path(YOUR_PATH)
filtered = [x for x in p.glob("**/*") if not x.name.startswith("eph")]

And if you want to filter a more complex pattern, you can define a function to do that, just like:

def not_in_pattern(x):
    return (not x.name.startswith("eph")) and not x.name.startswith("epi")


filtered = [x for x in p.glob("**/*") if not_in_pattern(x)]

Using that code, you can filter all files that start with eph or start with epi.

Answer 5

Late to the game but you could alternatively just apply a python filter to the result of a glob:

files = glob.iglob('your_path_here')
files_i_care_about = filter(lambda x: not x.startswith("eph"), files)

or replacing the lambda with an appropriate regex search, etc...

EDIT: I just realized that if you're using full paths the startswith won't work, so you'd need a regex

In [10]: a
Out[10]: ['/some/path/foo', 'some/path/bar', 'some/path/eph_thing']

In [11]: filter(lambda x: not re.search('/eph', x), a)
Out[11]: ['/some/path/foo', 'some/path/bar']

Answer 6

How about skipping the particular file while iterating over all the files in the folder! Below code would skip all excel files that start with 'eph'

import glob
import re
for file in glob.glob('*.xlsx'):
    if re.match('eph.*\.xlsx',file):
        continue
    else:
        #do your stuff here
        print(file)

This way you can use more complex regex patterns to include/exclude a particular set of files in a folder.

Answer 7

More generally, to exclude files that don't comply with some shell regexp, you could use module fnmatch:

import fnmatch

file_list = glob('somepath')    
for ind, ii in enumerate(file_list):
    if not fnmatch.fnmatch(ii, 'bash_regexp_with_exclude'):
        file_list.pop(ind)

The above will first generate a list from a given path and next pop out the files that won't satisfy the regular expression with the desired constraint.

Answer 8

Suppose you have this directory structure:

.
├── asd3442
├── eee2314
├── eph334
├── eph_dir
│   ├── asd330
│   ├── eph_file2
│   ├── exy123
│   └── file_with_eph
├── eph_file
├── not_eph_dir
│   ├── ephXXX
│   └── with_eph
└── not_eph_rest

You can use full globs to filter full path results with pathlib and a generator for the top level directory:

i_want=(fn for fn in Path(path_to).glob('*') if not fn.match('**/*/eph*'))

>>> list(i_want)
[PosixPath('/tmp/test/eee2314'), PosixPath('/tmp/test/asd3442'), PosixPath('/tmp/test/not_eph_rest'), PosixPath('/tmp/test/not_eph_dir')]

The pathlib method match uses globs to match a path object; The glob '**/*/eph*' is any full path that leads to a file with a name starting with 'eph'.

Alternatively, you can use the .name attribute with name.startswith('eph'):

i_want=(fn for fn in Path(path_to).glob('*') if not fn.name.startswith('eph'))

If you want only files, no directories:

i_want=(fn for fn in Path(path_to).glob('*') if fn.is_file() and not fn.match('**/*/eph*'))
# [PosixPath('/tmp/test/eee2314'), PosixPath('/tmp/test/asd3442'), PosixPath('/tmp/test/not_eph_rest')]
 

The same method works for recursive globs:

i_want=(fn for fn in Path(path_to).glob('**/*') 
           if fn.is_file() and not fn.match('**/*/eph*'))

# [PosixPath('/tmp/test/eee2314'), PosixPath('/tmp/test/asd3442'), 
   PosixPath('/tmp/test/not_eph_rest'), PosixPath('/tmp/test/eph_dir/asd330'), 
   PosixPath('/tmp/test/eph_dir/file_with_eph'), PosixPath('/tmp/test/eph_dir/exy123'), 
   PosixPath('/tmp/test/not_eph_dir/with_eph')]

Answer 9

As mentioned by the accepted answer, you can't exclude patterns with glob, so the following is a method to filter your glob result.

The accepted answer is probably the best pythonic way to do things but if you think list comprehensions look a bit ugly and want to make your code maximally numpythonic anyway (like I did) then you can do this (but note that this is probably less efficient than the list comprehension method):

import glob

data_files = glob.glob("path_to_files/*.fits")

light_files = np.setdiff1d( data_files, glob.glob("*BIAS*"))
light_files = np.setdiff1d(light_files, glob.glob("*FLAT*"))

(In my case, I had some image frames, bias frames, and flat frames all in one directory and I just wanted the image frames)

Answer 10

If the position of the character isn't important, that is for example to exclude manifests files (wherever it is found _) with glob and re - regular expression operations, you can use:

import glob
import re
for file in glob.glob('*.txt'):
    if re.match(r'.*\_.*', file):
        continue
    else:
        print(file)

Or with in a more elegant way - list comprehension

filtered = [f for f in glob.glob('*.txt') if not re.match(r'.*\_.*', f)]

for mach in filtered:
    print(mach)

Answer 11

To exclude exact word you may want to implement custom regex directive, which you will then replace by empty string before glob processing.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import glob
import re

# glob (or fnmatch) does not support exact word matching. This is custom directive to overcome this issue
glob_exact_match_regex = r"\[\^.*\]"
path = "[^exclude.py]*py"  # [^...] is a custom directive, that excludes exact match

# Process custom directive
try:  # Try to parse exact match direction
    exact_match = re.findall(glob_exact_match_regex, path)[0].replace('[^', '').replace(']', '')
except IndexError:
    exact_match = None
else:  # Remove custom directive
    path = re.sub(glob_exact_match_regex, "", path)
paths = glob.glob(path)
# Implement custom directive
if exact_match is not None:  # Exclude all paths with specified string
    paths = [p for p in paths if exact_match not in p]

print(paths)

Answer 12

import glob
import re

""" This is a path that should be excluded """
EXCLUDE = "/home/koosha/Documents/Excel"

files = glob.glob("/home/koosha/Documents/**/*.*" , recursive=True)
for file in files:
     if re.search(EXCLUDE,file):
         pass
    else:
         print(file)