Python wildcard search in string

Use fnmatch:

import fnmatch
lst = ['this','is','just','a','test']
filtered = fnmatch.filter(lst, 'th?s')

If you want to allow _ as a wildcard, just replace all underscores with '?' (for one character) or * (for multiple characters).

If you want your users to use even more powerful filtering options, consider allowing them to use regular expressions.

Regular expressions are probably the easiest solution to this problem:

import re
regex = re.compile('th.s')
l = ['this', 'is', 'just', 'a', 'test']
matches = [string for string in l if re.match(regex, string)]

You could try the fnmatch module, it's got a shell-like wildcard syntax

or can use regular expressions

import re

Do you mean any specific syntax for wildcards? Usually * stands for "one or many" characters and ? stands for one.

The simplest way probably is to translate a wildcard expression into a regular expression, then use that for filtering the results.