glob exclude pattern

Question

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/[!_]*')

You can deduct sets:

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

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')]

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']

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.

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.