Ant path style patterns

Question

What are the rules for Ant path style patterns.

The Ant site itself is surprisingly uninformative.

Answer 1

Ant-style path patterns matching in spring-framework:

The mapping matches URLs using the following rules:

• ? matches one character
• * matches zero or more characters
• ** matches zero or more 'directories' in a path
• {spring:[a-z]+} matches the regexp [a-z]+ as a path variable named "spring"

Some examples:

• com/t?st.jsp - matches com/test.jsp but also com/tast.jsp or com/txst.jsp
• com/*.jsp - matches all .jsp files in the com directory
• com/**/test.jsp - matches all test.jsp files underneath the com path
• org/springframework/**/*.jsp - matches all .jsp files underneath the org/springframework path
• org/**/servlet/bla.jsp - matches org/springframework/servlet/bla.jsp but also org/springframework/testing/servlet/bla.jsp and org/servlet/bla.jsp
• com/{filename:\\w+}.jsp will match com/test.jsp and assign the value test to the filename variable

http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/javadoc-api/org/springframework/util/AntPathMatcher.html