glob and bracket characters ('[]')

The brackets in glob are used for character classes (e.g. [a-z] will match lowercase letters). You can put each bracket in a character class to force them being matched:

path1 = "/Users/smcho/Desktop/bracket/[[]10,20[]]"

[[] is a character class containing only the character [, and []] is a character class containing only the character ] (the closing bracket can be placed in a character class by putting it in the first position).

Additionally, since brackets aren't escaped in string literals, your code will look for a backslash as well as a bracket.

In Python 3.4 you can use glob.escape.

glob uses fnmatch under the hood. You could use it directly:

import fnmatch, osnames = os.listdir("/Users/smcho/Desktop/bracket/[10,20]")print fnmatch.filter(names, '*.txt')

Or using (non-public) glob.glob1() (it is present at least in Python 2.3+ including Python 3):

import globprint glob.glob1("/Users/smcho/Desktop/bracket/[10,20]", '*.txt')

Here's the implementation of glob.glob1:

def glob1(dirname, pattern):    if not dirname:        dirname = os.curdir    if isinstance(pattern, unicode) and not isinstance(dirname, unicode):        dirname = unicode(dirname, sys.getfilesystemencoding() or                                   sys.getdefaultencoding())    try:        names = os.listdir(dirname)    except os.error:        return []    if pattern[0] != '.':        names = filter(lambda x: x[0] != '.', names)    return fnmatch.filter(names, pattern)