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From: mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Wanted: string matching routine
Message-ID: <1991Jun29.124352.21739@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu>
Date: 29 Jun 91 12:43:52 GMT
References: <2868E3EF.6133@ics.uci.edu>
Organization: McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines
Lines: 43

In article <2868E3EF.6133@ics.uci.edu>, vahid@vesta.ics.uci.edu (Frank Vahid) writes:

> Does anyone have a routine which is similar to strcmp, but permits
> unix-type wildcard characters in at least one of the strings?  For
> example, strmatch("abc*", "abcdefg") would return a value denoting a
> successful match.

I've written such things fairly often.  If you don't particularly care
about blinding speed, it's pretty easy to do something like this
(warning: untested)

strmatch(pat,str)
char *pat;
char *str;
{
 while (1)
  { switch (*pat)
     { case '\0':
	  return(*str == '\0');
	  break;
       case '?':
	  if (*str == '\0') return(0);
	  break;
       case '*':
	  if (strmatch(pat+1,str)) return(1);
	  if (*str) str ++;
	  pat ++;
	  continue; /* skip the increments below */
	  break;
       default:
	  if (*str != *pat) return(0);
	  break;
     }
    pat ++;
    str ++;
  }
}

					der Mouse

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