regular expression usage in glob.glob for python

Question

import glob

list = glob.glob(r\'*abc*.txt\') + glob.glob(r\'*123*.txt\') + glob.glob(r\'*a1b*.txt\')

for i in list:
  print i

This code works to

Answer 1

I'm surprised that no answers here used filter.

import os
import re

def glob_re(pattern, strings):
    return filter(re.compile(pattern).match, strings)

filenames = glob_re(r'.*(abc|123|a1b).*\.txt', os.listdir())

This accepts any iterator that returns strings, including lists, tuples, dicts(if all keys are strings), etc. If you want to support partial matches, you could change .match to .search. Please note that this obviously returns a generator, so if you want to use the results without iterating over them, you could convert the result to a list yourself, or wrap the return statement with list(...).