How can I support wildcards in user-defined search strings in Python?

Is there a simple way to support wildcards ("*") when searching strings - without using RegEx? Users are supposed to enter search terms using wildcards, but should not have to deal with the complexity of RegEx: ``` "foo*" => str.startswith("foo") "*foo" => str.endswith("foo") "*foo*" => "foo" in str ``` (it gets more complicated when there are multiple search terms though, e.g. "foobarbaz") This seems like a common issue, so I wonder whether there's a ready-made solution for it. Any help would be greatly appreciated!