permissive equality test on string
Question: I'm a python newbie with a problem too hard to tackle.

I have a string defining a path, were all the spaces have been converted to
underscores. How can I find if it corresponds to a real path?

e.g. a string like `/some/path_to/directory_1/and_to/directory_2`  
with a real path: `/some/path_to/directory 1/and_to/directory 2`

notice that the real path can contain BOTH spaces and underscores.

How can I feed it to `os.path.exists()` ???

thanks alessandro


Answer: Use [glob](http://docs.python.org/library/glob.html) but replacing every
underscore with a range `[ _]`:

    
    
    import glob
    glob.glob('/some/path_to/directory_1/and_to/directory_2'.replace('_', '[ _]'))
    

Note that this will fail if your path contains the character `[`. You can fix
this by first replacing `[` with `[[]`.

