Returning a list of wildcard matches from a HashMap in java

Question

I have a Hashmap which may contain wildcards (*) in the String.

For instance,

HashMap students_;

can have

Answer 1

You can use regex to match, but you must first turn "John*" into the regex equivalent "John.*", although you can do that on-the-fly.

Here's some code that will work:

String name = "John Smith"; // For example
Map students_ = new HashMap();

for (Map.Entry entry : students_.entrySet()) {
    // If the entry key is "John*", this code will match if name = "John Smith"
    if (name.matches("^.*" + entry.getKey().replace("*", ".*") + ".*$")) {
        // do something with the matching map entry
        System.out.println("Student " + entry.getValue() + " matched " + entry.getKey());
    }
}