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Wildcard string compare (globbing)

By , 15 Feb 2005
 

Usage:

This is a fast, lightweight, and simple pattern matching function.

if (wildcmp("bl?h.*", "blah.jpg")) {
  //we have a match!
} else {
  //no match =(
}

Function:

int wildcmp(const char *wild, const char *string) {
  // Written by Jack Handy - <A href="mailto:jakkhandy@hotmail.com">jakkhandy@hotmail.com</A>
  const char *cp = NULL, *mp = NULL;

  while ((*string) && (*wild != '*')) {
    if ((*wild != *string) && (*wild != '?')) {
      return 0;
    }
    wild++;
    string++;
  }

  while (*string) {
    if (*wild == '*') {
      if (!*++wild) {
        return 1;
      }
      mp = wild;
      cp = string+1;
    } else if ((*wild == *string) || (*wild == '?')) {
      wild++;
      string++;
    } else {
      wild = mp;
      string = cp++;
    }
  }

  while (*wild == '*') {
    wild++;
  }
  return !*wild;
}

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

A list of licenses authors might use can be found here

About the Author

Jack Handy
Web Developer
United States United States
Member
No Biography provided

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Comments and Discussions

 
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GeneralImproved matching with end-of-textmemberAnders Heie11 May '09 - 15:20 
Great code, but when trying this I realized that the following pattern is a match:
 
Search: ????????
Text to search: ABC
 
The problem is that the pattern can be LONGER than the text searched, in which case it should return a not found, but instead returns found.
 
Also, this example succeeds:
 
Search: y*n
Text to search: yessir
 
But of course should fail, since I'm looking for a text that ends with n
 
So I re-wrote your program to this, to correctly handle this situation.
 
bool StrWildCmp(char* wildstring, char *matchstring){
 
	
	char stopstring[1];
	*stopstring = 0;
 
	while(*matchstring) {
		if (*wildstring == '*') {
		  if (!*++wildstring) {
			return true;
		  } else {
			  *stopstring = *wildstring;
		  }
		}
 
		if(*stopstring) {
			if(*stopstring == *matchstring ) {
				wildstring++;
				matchstring++;
				*stopstring = 0;
			} else {
				matchstring++;
			}
		} else if((*wildstring == *matchstring) || (*wildstring == '?')) {
				wildstring++;
				matchstring++;
		} else {
			return false;
		}
 
		if(!*matchstring && *wildstring && *wildstring != '*') {
			// matchstring too short
			return false;
		}
	}
 
  return true;
}
 
Thanks again for the inspiration. Cool | :cool:
GeneralRe: Improved matching with end-of-text: some cases don't work properly!memberroadrunner31412 Aug '09 - 3:35 

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