search - Create regex from glob expression

Question

i write program that parse text with regular expression. Regular expression should be obtained from user. I deside to use glob syntax for user input, and convert glob string to the regular expression internally. For example:

"foo.? bar*" 

should be converted to

"^.*foo.warw+.*"

Somehow, i need to escape all meaningful characters from the string, then i need to replace glob * and ? characters with apropriate regexp syntax. What is the most convinient way to do this?

Answer 1

no need for incomplete or unreliable hacks. there's a function included with python for this

>>> import fnmatch
>>> fnmatch.translate( '*.foo' )
'.*\.foo$'
>>> fnmatch.translate( '[a-z]*.txt' )
'[a-z].*\.txt$'