Wildcard matching in Java

Question

I\'m writing a simple debugging program that takes as input simple strings that can contain stars to indicate a wildcard match-any

*.wav  // matches 

        

Answer 1

Lucene has classes that provide this capability, with additional support for backslash as an escape character. ? matches a single character, 1 matches 0 or more characters, \ escapes the following character. Supports Unicode code points. Supposed to be fast but I haven't tested.

CharacterRunAutomaton characterRunAutomaton;
boolean matches;
characterRunAutomaton = new CharacterRunAutomaton(WildcardQuery.toAutomaton(new Term("", "Walmart")));
matches = characterRunAutomaton.run("Walmart"); // true
matches = characterRunAutomaton.run("Wal*mart"); // false
matches = characterRunAutomaton.run("Wal\\*mart"); // false
matches = characterRunAutomaton.run("Waldomart"); // false
characterRunAutomaton = new CharacterRunAutomaton(WildcardQuery.toAutomaton(new Term("", "Wal*mart")));
matches = characterRunAutomaton.run("Walmart"); // true
matches = characterRunAutomaton.run("Wal*mart"); // true
matches = characterRunAutomaton.run("Wal\\*mart"); // true
matches = characterRunAutomaton.run("Waldomart"); // true
characterRunAutomaton = new CharacterRunAutomaton(WildcardQuery.toAutomaton(new Term("", "Wal\\*mart")));
matches = characterRunAutomaton.run("Walmart"); // false
matches = characterRunAutomaton.run("Wal*mart"); // true
matches = characterRunAutomaton.run("Wal\\*mart"); // false
matches = characterRunAutomaton.run("Waldomart"); // false