Ant path style patterns

Question

What are the rules for Ant path style patterns.

The Ant site itself is surprisingly uninformative.

Answer 1

Most upvoted answer by @user11153 using tables for a more readable format.

---

The mapping matches URLs using the following rules:

+-----------------+---------------------------------------------------------+
| Wildcard        |            Description                                  |
+-----------------+---------------------------------------------------------+
| ?               | Matches exactly one character.                          |
| *               | Matches zero or more characters.                        |
| **              | Matches zero or more 'directories' in a path            |
| {spring:[a-z]+} | Matches regExp [a-z]+ as a path variable named "spring" |
+-----------------+---------------------------------------------------------+

Some examples:

+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------+
| Example                      | Matches:                                               |
+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------+
| com/t?st.jsp                 | com/test.jsp but also com/tast.jsp or com/txst.jsp     |
| com/*.jsp                    | All .jsp files in the com directory                    |
| com/**/test.jsp              | All test.jsp files underneath the com path             |
| org/springframework/**/*.jsp | All .jsp files underneath the org/springframework path |
| org/**/servlet/bla.jsp       | org/springframework/servlet/bla.jsp                    |
|                       also:  | org/springframework/testing/servlet/bla.jsp            |
|                       also:  | org/servlet/bla.jsp                                    |
| com/{filename:\\w+}.jsp      | com/test.jsp & assign value test to filename variable  |
+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------+