Modified use of 'format' statements to be Python 2.6 compatible.  Also tweaked some methods for PEP-8 reasons.

The format strucuture in 2.7 and beyond does not require the index of argument to appear in the format string.
This is nice for 2.7 but breaks 2.6  .. stop using the new construct as we have old clients.
Made the use of the cutout syntax possible.

Normally [*] is a glob structure, but if its at the end of a filename and looks like a cutout string we teat it that way instead.
This magic will likely cause cause trouble at some point.
added a test that does pattern match cutout.