glob pattern matching in .NET

Question

Is there a built-in mechanism in .NET to match patterns other than Regular Expressions? I'd like to match using UNIX style (glob) wildcards (* = any number of any character).

I'd like to use this for a end-user facing control. I fear that permitting all RegEx capabilities will be very confusing.

Answer 1

I like my code a little more semantic, so I wrote this extension method:

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace Whatever
{
    public static class StringExtensions
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Compares the string against a given pattern.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="str">The string.</param>
        /// <param name="pattern">The pattern to match, where "*" means any sequence of characters, and "?" means any single character.</param>
        /// <returns><c>true</c> if the string matches the given pattern; otherwise <c>false</c>.</returns>
        public static bool Like(this string str, string pattern)
        {
            return new Regex(
                "^" + Regex.Escape(pattern).Replace(@"\*", ".*").Replace(@"\?", ".") + "$",
                RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Singleline
            ).IsMatch(str);
        }
    }
}

(change the namespace and/or copy the extension method to your own string extensions class)

Using this extension, you can write statements like this:

if (File.Name.Like("*.jpg"))
{
   ....
}

Just sugar to make your code a little more legible :-)