Compare string with wildcards

[RadGH]

I'm wondering if its possible to take a string (Such as "/dir/MyFilename.db") and compare it to a wildcard, example:

 

If (isVisible($myFile, '*.db')) { ...show file in list... }

 

Searched google for PHP wildcards, but that isn't helping. The closest thing I found was fnmatch which only works on unix, and isn't what I want anyway (I want to compare strings, not necessarily a filename).

 

I'm trying to build a small file browser and automatically hide what should be hidden, but I could also use the wildcards in other pieces of my program.

[RadGH]

Looked a bit and came accross the "preg_match" function, but it makes little to no sense (I must be missing something, the documentation doesn't mention all the character it uses in the expressions).

 

Heres what I came up with, although they all return true. Something like this is what I'm looking for, though.

test("./Folder/etc");
test("/Folder/etc");
test("/Folder/etc.png");


function test($str) {
if (preg_match("/.*/", $str)) {
    echo "found\n";
} else {
    echo "not found\n";
}
}

//Returns "found found found"

 

 

[thebadbad]

preg_match() is using regular expressions (good reading here: http://www.regular-expressions.info/), and that is the way you wanna go. If you only want to check if the filename ends in ".db" however, you won't need RegEx, pathinfo() would work for that:

 

<?php
function validate($path, $ext) {
$info = pathinfo($path);
if ($info['extension'] == $ext) {
	return true;
} else {
	return false;
}
}
if (validate('/dir/MyFilename.db', 'db')) {
//do something if file ends in 'db'
}
?>

 

If you wanna use more complicated wildcards, preg_match() is good. If you wanna check if a string ends in prefix*.db for example:

 

<?php
$path = '/dir/prefix_MyFilename.db';
if (preg_match('~prefix[^/]*\.db$~iD', $path)) {
//do something
}
?>

 

~ is a opening pattern delimiter

prefix matches literal 'prefix'

[^/] matches any character except of a forward slash (/) one time

* the asterisk is a quantifier making the preceding char match 0 or more times.

\.db matches a literal dot (because it's escaped with backslash - else a dot matches any char) and literal 'db'.

$ matches the end of the string, making sure we're dealing with the filename and not e.g. a directory name

~ is a closing pattern delimiter

i the i modifier makes the search pattern case-insensitive

D the D modifier makes sure the $ only matches 'end of line'. If not specified, the $ also matches just before a new line character at the end.