Need to perform Wildcard (*,?, etc) search on a st

Question

I need to perform Wildcard (*, ?, etc.) search on a string. This is what I have done:

string input = "Message";
string pattern = "d*";
Regex regex = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

if (regex.IsMatch(input))
{
    MessageBox.Show("Found");
}
else
{
    MessageBox.Show("Not Found");
}

With the above code "Found" block is hitting but actually it should not!

If my pattern is "e*" then only "Found" should hit.

My understanding or requirement is d* search should find the text containing "d" followed by any characters.

Should I change my pattern as "d.*" and "e.*"? Is there any support in .NET for Wild Card which internally does it while using Regex class?

Answer 1

You must escape special Regex symbols in input wildcard pattern (for example pattern *.txt will equivalent to ^.*\.txt$) So slashes, braces and many special symbols must be replaced with @"\" + s, where s - special Regex symbol.

Answer 2

All upper code is not correct to the end.

This is because when searching zz*foo* or zz* you will not get correct results.

And if you search "abcd*" in "abcd" in TotalCommander will he find a abcd file so all upper code is wrong.

Here is the correct code.

public string WildcardToRegex(string pattern)
{             
    string result= Regex.Escape(pattern).
        Replace(@"\*", ".+?").
        Replace(@"\?", "."); 

    if (result.EndsWith(".+?"))
    {
        result = result.Remove(result.Length - 3, 3);
        result += ".*";
    }

    return result;
}

Answer 3

You may want to use WildcardPattern from System.Management.Automation assembly. See my answer here.

Answer 4

From http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/wildcardtoregex.aspx:

public static string WildcardToRegex(string pattern)
{
    return "^" + Regex.Escape(pattern)
                      .Replace(@"\*", ".*")
                      .Replace(@"\?", ".")
               + "$";
}

So something like foo*.xls? will get transformed to ^foo.*\.xls.$.