Is there a better way to use glob.glob in python to get a list of multiple file types such as .txt, .mdown, and .markdown? Right now I have something like this:
projectFiles1 = glob.glob( os.path.join(projectDir, '*.txt') ) projectFiles2 = glob.glob( os.path.join(projectDir, '*.mdown') ) projectFiles3 = glob.glob( os.path.join(projectDir, '*.markdown') )
Answers:
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Method 1
Maybe there is a better way, but how about:
import glob
types = ('*.pdf', '*.cpp') # the tuple of file types
files_grabbed = []
for files in types:
files_grabbed.extend(glob.glob(files))
# files_grabbed is the list of pdf and cpp files
Perhaps there is another way, so wait in case someone else comes up with a better answer.
Method 2
glob returns a list: why not just run it multiple times and concatenate the results?
from glob import glob
project_files = glob('*.txt') + glob('*.mdown') + glob('*.markdown')
Method 3
from glob import glob
files = glob('*.gif')
files.extend(glob('*.png'))
files.extend(glob('*.jpg'))
print(files)
If you need to specify a path, loop over match patterns and keep the join inside the loop for simplicity:
from os.path import join
from glob import glob
files = []
for ext in ('*.gif', '*.png', '*.jpg'):
files.extend(glob(join("path/to/dir", ext)))
print(files)
Method 4
So many answers that suggest globbing as many times as number of extensions, I’d prefer globbing just once instead:
from pathlib import Path
files = (p.resolve() for p in Path(path).glob("**/*") if p.suffix in {".c", ".cc", ".cpp", ".hxx", ".h"})
Method 5
Chain the results:
import itertools as it, glob
def multiple_file_types(*patterns):
return it.chain.from_iterable(glob.iglob(pattern) for pattern in patterns)
Then:
for filename in multiple_file_types("*.txt", "*.sql", "*.log"):
# do stuff
Method 6
For example, for *.mp3 and *.flac on multiple folders, you can do:
mask = r'music/*/*.[mf][pl][3a]*' glob.glob(mask)
The idea can be extended to more file extensions, but you have to check that the combinations won’t match any other unwanted file extension you may have on those folders. So, be careful with this.
To automatically combine an arbitrary list of extensions into a single glob pattern, you can do the following:
def multi_extension_glob_mask(mask_base, *extensions):
mask_ext = ['[{}]'.format(''.join(set(c))) for c in zip(*extensions)]
if not mask_ext or len(set(len(e) for e in extensions)) > 1:
mask_ext.append('*')
return mask_base + ''.join(mask_ext)
mask = multi_extension_glob_mask('music/*/*.', 'mp3', 'flac', 'wma')
print(mask) # music/*/*.[mfw][pml][a3]*
Method 7
with glob it is not possible. you can use only:
* matches everything
? matches any single character
[seq] matches any character in seq
[!seq] matches any character not in seq
use os.listdir and a regexp to check patterns:
for x in os.listdir('.'):
if re.match('.*.txt|.*.sql', x):
print x
Method 8
While Python’s default glob doesn’t really follow after Bash’s glob, you can do this with other libraries. We can enable braces in wcmatch’s glob.
>>> from wcmatch import glob
>>> glob.glob('*.{md,ini}', flags=glob.BRACE)
['LICENSE.md', 'README.md', 'tox.ini']
You can even use extended glob patterns if that is your preference:
from wcmatch import glob
>>> glob.glob('*<a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="321c72">[email protected]</a>(md|ini)', flags=glob.EXTGLOB)
['LICENSE.md', 'README.md', 'tox.ini']
Method 9
Same answer as @BPL (which is computationally efficient) but which can handle any glob pattern rather than extension:
import os
from fnmatch import fnmatch
folder = "path/to/folder/"
patterns = ("*.txt", "*.md", "*.markdown")
files = [f.path for f in os.scandir(folder) if any(fnmatch(f, p) for p in patterns)]
This solution is both efficient and convenient. It also closely matches the behavior of glob (see the documentation).
Note that this is simpler with the built-in package pathlib:
from pathlib import Path
folder = Path("/path/to/folder")
patterns = ("*.txt", "*.md", "*.markdown")
files = [f for f in folder.iterdir() if any(f.match(p) for p in patterns)]
Method 10
Here is one-line list-comprehension variant of Pat’s answer (which also includes that you wanted to glob in a specific project directory):
import os, glob
exts = ['*.txt', '*.mdown', '*.markdown']
files = [f for ext in exts for f in glob.glob(os.path.join(project_dir, ext))]
You loop over the extensions (for ext in exts), and then for each extension you take each file matching the glob pattern (for f in glob.glob(os.path.join(project_dir, ext)).
This solution is short, and without any unnecessary for-loops, nested list-comprehensions, or functions to clutter the code. Just pure, expressive, pythonic Zen.
This solution allows you to have a custom list of exts that can be changed without having to update your code. (This is always a good practice!)
The list-comprehension is the same used in Laurent’s solution (which I’ve voted for). But I would argue that it is usually unnecessary to factor out a single line to a separate function, which is why I’m providing this as an alternative solution.
Bonus:
If you need to search not just a single directory, but also all sub-directories, you can pass recursive=True and use the multi-directory glob symbol ** 1:
files = [f for ext in exts
for f in glob.glob(os.path.join(project_dir, '**', ext), recursive=True)]
This will invoke glob.glob('<project_dir>/**/*.txt', recursive=True) and so on for each extension.
1 Technically, the ** glob symbol simply matches one or more characters including forward-slash / (unlike the singular * glob symbol). In practice, you just need to remember that as long as you surround ** with forward slashes (path separators), it matches zero or more directories.
Method 11
A one-liner, Just for the hell of it..
folder = "C:\multi_pattern_glob_one_liner" files = [item for sublist in [glob.glob(folder + ext) for ext in ["/*.txt", "/*.bat"]] for item in sublist]
output:
['C:\multi_pattern_glob_one_liner\dummy_txt.txt', 'C:\multi_pattern_glob_one_liner\dummy_bat.bat']
Method 12
files = glob.glob('*.txt')
files.extend(glob.glob('*.dat'))
Method 13
By the results I’ve obtained from empirical tests, it turned out that glob.glob isn’t the better way to filter out files by their extensions. Some of the reason are:
- The globbing “language” does not allows perfect specification of multiple extension.
- The former point results in obtaining incorrect results depending on file extensions.
- The globbing method is empirically proven to be slower than most other methods.
- Even if it’s strange even other filesystems objects can have “extensions“, folders too.
I’ve tested (for correcteness and efficiency in time) the following 4 different methods to filter out files by extensions and puts them in a list:
from glob import glob, iglob
from re import compile, findall
from os import walk
def glob_with_storage(args):
elements = ''.join([f'[{i}]' for i in args.extensions])
globs = f'{args.target}/**/*{elements}'
results = glob(globs, recursive=True)
return results
def glob_with_iteration(args):
elements = ''.join([f'[{i}]' for i in args.extensions])
globs = f'{args.target}/**/*{elements}'
results = [i for i in iglob(globs, recursive=True)]
return results
def walk_with_suffixes(args):
results = []
for r, d, f in walk(args.target):
for ff in f:
for e in args.extensions:
if ff.endswith(e):
results.append(path_join(r,ff))
break
return results
def walk_with_regs(args):
reg = compile('|'.join([f'{i}$' for i in args.extensions]))
results = []
for r, d, f in walk(args.target):
for ff in f:
if len(findall(reg,ff)):
results.append(path_join(r, ff))
return results
By running the code above on my laptop I obtained the following auto-explicative results.
Elapsed time for '7 times glob_with_storage()': 0.365023 seconds. mean : 0.05214614 median : 0.051861 stdev : 0.001492152 min : 0.050864 max : 0.054853 Elapsed time for '7 times glob_with_iteration()': 0.360037 seconds. mean : 0.05143386 median : 0.050864 stdev : 0.0007847381 min : 0.050864 max : 0.052859 Elapsed time for '7 times walk_with_suffixes()': 0.26529 seconds. mean : 0.03789857 median : 0.037899 stdev : 0.0005759071 min : 0.036901 max : 0.038896 Elapsed time for '7 times walk_with_regs()': 0.290223 seconds. mean : 0.04146043 median : 0.040891 stdev : 0.0007846776 min : 0.04089 max : 0.042885 Results sizes: 0 2451 1 2451 2 2446 3 2446 Differences between glob() and walk(): 0 E:xyzvenvlibpython3.7site-packagesCythonIncludesnumpy 1 E:xyzvenvlibpython3.7site-packagesCythonUtilityCppSupport.cpp 2 E:xyzvenvlibpython3.7site-packagesfuturemovesxmlrpc 3 E:xyzvenvlibpython3.7site-packagesCythonIncludeslibcpp 4 E:xyzvenvlibpython3.7site-packagesfuturebackportsxmlrpc Elapsed time for 'main': 1.317424 seconds.
The fastest way to filter out files by extensions, happens even to be the ugliest one. Which is, nested for loops and string comparison using the endswith() method.
Moreover, as you can see, the globbing algorithms (with the pattern E:xyz**/*[py][pyc]) even with only 2 extension given (py and pyc) returns also incorrect results.
Method 14
Python 3
We can use pathlib; .glob still doesn’t support globbing multiple arguments or within braces (as in POSIX shells) but we can easily filter the result.
For example, where you might ideally like to do:
# NOT VALID
Path(config_dir).glob("*.{ini,toml}")
# NOR IS
Path(config_dir).glob("*.ini", "*.toml")
you can do:
filter(lambda p: p.suffix in {".ini", ".toml"}, Path(config_dir).glob("*"))
which isn’t too much worse.
Method 15
I have released Formic which implements multiple includes in a similar way to Apache Ant’s FileSet and Globs.
The search can be implemented:
import formic
patterns = ["*.txt", "*.markdown", "*.mdown"]
fileset = formic.FileSet(directory=projectDir, include=patterns)
for file_name in fileset.qualified_files():
# Do something with file_name
Because the full Ant glob is implemented, you can include different directories with each pattern, so you could choose only those .txt files in one subdirectory, and the .markdown in another, for example:
patterns = [ "/unformatted/**/*.txt", "/formatted/**/*.mdown" ]
I hope this helps.
Method 16
This is a Python 3.4+ pathlib solution:
exts = ".pdf", ".doc", ".xls", ".csv", ".ppt"
filelist = (str(i) for i in map(pathlib.Path, os.listdir(src)) if i.suffix.lower() in exts and not i.stem.startswith("~"))
Also it ignores all file names starting with ~.
Method 17
After coming here for help, I made my own solution and wanted to share it. It’s based on user2363986’s answer, but I think this is more scalable. Meaning, that if you have 1000 extensions, the code will still look somewhat elegant.
from glob import glob
directoryPath = "C:\temp\*."
fileExtensions = [ "jpg", "jpeg", "png", "bmp", "gif" ]
listOfFiles = []
for extension in fileExtensions:
listOfFiles.extend( glob( directoryPath + extension ))
for file in listOfFiles:
print(file) # Or do other stuff
Method 18
Not glob, but here’s another way using a list comprehension:
extensions = 'txt mdown markdown'.split()
projectFiles = [f for f in os.listdir(projectDir)
if os.path.splitext(f)[1][1:] in extensions]
Method 19
The following function _glob globs for multiple file extensions.
import glob
import os
def _glob(path, *exts):
"""Glob for multiple file extensions
Parameters
----------
path : str
A file name without extension, or directory name
exts : tuple
File extensions to glob for
Returns
-------
files : list
list of files matching extensions in exts in path
"""
path = os.path.join(path, "*") if os.path.isdir(path) else path + "*"
return [f for files in [glob.glob(path + ext) for ext in exts] for f in files]
files = _glob(projectDir, ".txt", ".mdown", ".markdown")
Method 20
You can try to make a manual list comparing the extension of existing with those you require.
ext_list = ['gif','jpg','jpeg','png'];
file_list = []
for file in glob.glob('*.*'):
if file.rsplit('.',1)[1] in ext_list :
file_list.append(file)
Method 21
import os
import glob
import operator
from functools import reduce
types = ('*.jpg', '*.png', '*.jpeg')
lazy_paths = (glob.glob(os.path.join('my_path', t)) for t in types)
paths = reduce(operator.add, lazy_paths, [])
https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/functools.html#functools.reduce
https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/operator.html#operator.add
Method 22
To glob multiple file types, you need to call glob() function several times in a loop. Since this function returns a list, you need to concatenate the lists.
For instance, this function do the job:
import glob
import os
def glob_filetypes(root_dir, *patterns):
return [path
for pattern in patterns
for path in glob.glob(os.path.join(root_dir, pattern))]
Simple usage:
project_dir = "path/to/project/dir"
for path in sorted(glob_filetypes(project_dir, '*.txt', '*.mdown', '*.markdown')):
print(path)
You can also use glob.iglob() to have an iterator:
Return an iterator which yields the same values as glob() without actually storing them all simultaneously.
def iglob_filetypes(root_dir, *patterns):
return (path
for pattern in patterns
for path in glob.iglob(os.path.join(root_dir, pattern)))
Method 23
One glob, many extensions… but imperfect solution (might match other files).
filetypes = ['tif', 'jpg']
filetypes = zip(*[list(ft) for ft in filetypes])
filetypes = ["".join(ch) for ch in filetypes]
filetypes = ["[%s]" % ch for ch in filetypes]
filetypes = "".join(filetypes) + "*"
print(filetypes)
# => [tj][ip][fg]*
glob.glob("/path/to/*.%s" % filetypes)
Method 24
I had the same issue and this is what I came up with
import os, sys, re
#without glob
src_dir = '/mnt/mypics/'
src_pics = []
ext = re.compile('.*.(|{}|)$'.format('|'.join(['png', 'jpeg', 'jpg']).encode('utf-8')))
for root, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(src_dir):
for filename in filter(lambda name:ext.search(name),filenames):
src_pics.append(os.path.join(root, filename))
Method 25
If you use pathlib try this:
import pathlib
extensions = ['.py', '.txt']
root_dir = './test/'
files = filter(lambda p: p.suffix in extensions, pathlib.Path(root_dir).glob('**/*'))
print(list(files))
Method 26
Use a list of extension and iterate through
from os.path import join
from glob import glob
files = []
extensions = ['*.gif', '*.png', '*.jpg']
for ext in extensions:
files.extend(glob(join("path/to/dir", ext)))
print(files)
Method 27
From previous answer
glob('*.jpg') + glob('*.png')
Here is a shorter one,
from glob import glob
extensions = ['jpg', 'png'] # to find these filename extensions
# Method 1: loop one by one and extend to the output list
output = []
[output.extend(glob(f'*.{name}')) for name in extensions]
print(output)
# Method 2: even shorter
# loop filename extension to glob() it and flatten it to a list
output = [p for p2 in [glob(f'*.{name}') for name in extensions] for p in p2]
print(output)
Method 28
This worked for me!
split('.')[-1]
above code separate the filename suffix (*.xxx) so it can help you
for filename in glob.glob(folder + '*.*'):
print(folder+filename)
if filename.split('.')[-1] != 'tif' and
filename.split('.')[-1] != 'tiff' and
filename.split('.')[-1] != 'bmp' and
filename.split('.')[-1] != 'jpg' and
filename.split('.')[-1] != 'jpeg' and
filename.split('.')[-1] != 'png':
continue
# Your code
Method 29
You could use filter:
import os
import glob
projectFiles = filter(
lambda x: os.path.splitext(x)[1] in [".txt", ".mdown", ".markdown"]
glob.glob(os.path.join(projectDir, "*"))
)
Method 30
You could also use reduce() like so:
import glob file_types = ['*.txt', '*.mdown', '*.markdown'] project_files = reduce(lambda list1, list2: list1 + list2, (glob.glob(t) for t in file_types))
this creates a list from glob.glob() for each pattern and reduces them to a single list.
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0