Formic: Apache Ant FileSet and Globs in Python
==============================================
Features
--------
Formic is a Python implementation of Apache Ant `FileSet and Globs
<http://ant.apache.org/manual/dirtasks.html#patterns>`_ including the directory
wildcard `**`.
FileSet provides a terse way of specifying a set of files without having to
enumerate individual files. It:
1. **Includes** files from one or more Ant Globs, then
2. Optionally **excludes** files matching further Ant Globs.
Ant Globs are a superset of ordinary file system globs. The key differences:
* They match whole paths, eg ``/root/myapp/*.py``
* \*\* matches *any* directory or *directories*, eg ``/root/**/*.py`` matches
``/root/one/two/my.py``
* You can match the topmost directory or directories, eg ``/root/**``, or
* The parent directory of the file, eg ``**/parent/*.py``, or
* Any parent directory, eg ``**/test/**/*.py``
This approach is the de-facto standard in several other languages and tools,
including Apache Ant and Maven, Ruby (Dir) and Perforce (...).
Python has built-in support for simple globs in `fnmatcher
<http://docs.python.org/library/fnmatch.html>`_ and `glob
<http://docs.python.org/library/glob.html>`_, but Formic:
* Can recursively scan subdirectories
* Matches arbitrary directories *in* the path (eg ``/1/**/2/**/3/**/*.py``).
* Has a high level interface:
* Specify one or more globs to find files
* Globs can be used to exclude files
* Ant, and Formic, has a set of *default excludes*. These are files and
directories that, by default, are automatically excluded from all searches.
The majority of these are files and directories related to VCS (eg .svn
directories). Formic adds ``__pycache__``.
* Iterate through all matches in the sub-tree
* Is more efficient with many common patterns; it runs relatively faster on
large directory trees with large numbers of files.
Quickstart
----------
Formic can be installed with pip::
$ pip install formic-py3
Once installed, you can use Formic either from the command line::
$ formic -i "*.py" -e "__init__.py" "**/*test*/" "test_*"
This will search for files all Python files under the current directory
excluding all `__init__.py` files, any file in directories whose name contains
the word 'test', and any files that start `test_`.
Or integrated right into your Python project::
import formic
fileset = formic.FileSet(include="**.py",
exclude=["**/*test*/**", "test_*"]
)
for file_name in fileset:
# Do something with file_name
...
That's about it :)
About
-----
Formic was originally written by `Andrew Alcock <mailto:formic@aviser.asia>`_
of `Aviser LLP <http://www.aviser.asia>`_, Singapore. It was forked by Scott
Belden to add python 3 support.
Formic is Copyright (C) 2012, Aviser LLP and python and released under
`GPLv3 <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>`_.
Formic-Py3 is Copyright (C) 2017, Scott Belden.
