Wildcard string matching

Question

What is the most efficient wildcard string matching algorithm? I am asking only about an idea, it is not necessary to provide actual code.

I\'m thinking that such al

Answer 1

There is a paper covering the fastest options here http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html in particular it allows you avoid naive algorithms that become pathologically slow when long patterns are used.

It covers generic regular expressions but you can limit your implementation to the subset you require.