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From: staff@cadlab.sublink.ORG (Alex Martelli)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: string compare with wildcards
Message-ID: <552@cadlab.sublink.ORG>
Date: 14 Dec 90 09:00:48 GMT
References: <1990Dec13.133412.11981@iesd.auc.dk>
Organization: CAD.LAB, Bologna, Italia
Lines: 33

claus@iesd.auc.dk (Claus S. Jensen) writes:
	...
>   Does anybody out there have a routine that compares
>two strings, one of which contains wildcards (*,?).

It's real easy, thanks to recursion (no "stylistic" flames, please!-):

int wildmatch(pat, str) char *pat, *str; {
    int pat_ch, str_ch;
    while(pat_ch = *pat++) {
        if(pat_ch == '*') {
            if(*pat == 0) return 1;
            for(;;) {
                if(wildmatch(pat, str)) return 1;
                if((str_ch = *str++)==0) return 0;
            }
        } else {
            if((str_ch = *str++)==0) return 0;
            if(pat_ch != '?' && str_ch != pat_ch) return 0;
        }
    }
    return *str == 0;
}

Optimizing this, and in particular eliminating the recursive call,
is, on the other hand, a rather interesting exercise, but one I'd
undertake only if wildcard-matching was proven-by-profiling to be
a bottleneck in my application... which is rather unlikely, I think.
-- 
Alex Martelli - CAD.LAB s.p.a., v. Stalingrado 45, Bologna, Italia
Email: (work:) staff@cadlab.sublink.org, (home:) alex@am.sublink.org
Phone: (work:) ++39 (51) 371099, (home:) ++39 (51) 250434; 
Fax: ++39 (51) 366964 (work only), Fidonet: 332/401.3 (home only).