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From: ttobler@unislc.uucp (Trent Tobler)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: pattern/wild card matching
Message-ID: <1991Feb17.234654.25900@unislc.uucp>
Date: 17 Feb 91 23:46:54 GMT
References: <2953@cirrusl.UUCP>
Organization: unisys
Lines: 33

From article <2953@cirrusl.UUCP>, by dhesi%cirrusl@oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com (Rahul Dhesi):
> All the code referred to or posted seems to pay no special attention to
> the "/" character, which in a UNIX environment has special meaning.  It
> would be really nice if code were available that would do the following
> things:
> 
> 1.   Either require "/" to be explicitly matched or allow it to be
> matched by wildcards.  For example, * would match any character
> sequence except slash, but ** would match any character sequence.
> 
> 2.   Allow the C-shell brace notation for grouping, i.e., {a,b,c}d in a
> pattern would match any of ad, bd, and cd in the filename.
> 
> I found Karl Heuer's posted code very useful, but it would be even
> nicer if somebody had a canned routine that includes the above
> features.


If the code he posted follows grep style matching, all of the above is
possible using the '[ ... ]' construct.  For example, to match any character
except a "/", use "[^/]", ie..  "m[^/]*/abc" will match "me/abc", "mirth/abc",
etc.

In number 2, instead of "{a,b,c}d", use "[abc]d".  Of course, one drawback to
this is that grep doesn't allow alternate strings of characters (at least as
far as I know.)  For example, the syntax I have seen used is
"I will( | not )sleep"  should match either "I will sleep", or
"I will not sleep".


--

    Trent Tobler  - ttobler@csulx.weber.edu