How to Use Glob in Python

Glob is a Python module that uses wildcard characters to match and find files or directories. When writing programs, it’s quite common to need to access various files on the disk.

Glob provides a simple and efficient way to handle these needs. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and use the Glob module in your Python environment.

Step 1: Verifying the Installation

To verify your installation, you can open your Python shell and try to import the Glob module:

If the command gets executed without any errors, it means Glob was installed successfully.

Step 2: How to Use Glob

Now that you’ve installed Glob, the next step is to understand how to use it. For example, let’s say we want to identify all Python files in a certain directory. Here is how the Glob can do that:

This code will print the names of all Python files in the current directory. Note that glob.glob("*.py") is the method that seeks all files with a .py extension.

Output:

In my case, the program displayed this list of the .py files:

calc.py
create_zip.py
example.py
external_script.py
file1.py
file2.py
file_to_be_imported.py
get_location.py
hello.py
hello_world.py
main.py
mymath.py
my_script.py.py
person.py
process.py
rectangle.py
run_process.py
run_zip.py
Scraper.py
temp.py
to_spend.py
to_spend2.py
__init__.py

Conclusion

As we have seen from this tutorial, the Glob module is a powerful and important tool for managing and manipulating files in Python. Being able to handle files is a fundamental skill for any professional Python developer.

With Glob, you can streamline and enhance these operations with ease and efficiency. Always remember to make good use of official Python documentation, it can serve as a source of valuable information when dealing with file-management tasks.