Converting shell wildcards to regex

Question

I want to search for titles using shell wildcards like *.js, *.*.* etc. in js. The thing is I loop through a list of titles and I need to filter the files using a js regex test. How do I convert shell wildcards to regex in a good way or are there any libraries that already does that?

Note: I want a generic converter from shell wildcards to regex.

Answer 1

If you want a generic converter function, this should work:

function globStringToRegex(str) {
    return new RegExp(preg_quote(str).replace(/\\\*/g, '.*').replace(/\\\?/g, '.'), 'g');
}
function preg_quote (str, delimiter) {
    // http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net
    // +   original by: booeyOH
    // +   improved by: Ates Goral (http://magnetiq.com)
    // +   improved by: Kevin van Zonneveld (http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net)
    // +   bugfixed by: Onno Marsman
    // +   improved by: Brett Zamir (http://brett-zamir.me)
    // *     example 1: preg_quote("$40");
    // *     returns 1: '\$40'
    // *     example 2: preg_quote("*RRRING* Hello?");
    // *     returns 2: '\*RRRING\* Hello\?'
    // *     example 3: preg_quote("\\.+*?[^]$(){}=!<>|:");
    // *     returns 3: '\\\.\+\*\?\[\^\]\$\(\)\{\}\=\!\<\>\|\:'
    return (str + '').replace(new RegExp('[.\\\\+*?\\[\\^\\]$(){}=!<>|:\\' + (delimiter || '') + '-]', 'g'), '\\$&');
}

(preg_quote function from here: http://phpjs.org/functions/preg_quote/).

Use:

var realRegex = globStringToRegex("2012-*-*.js"); //returns a RegExp object of /2012\-.*\-.*\.js/g

Here's a JS fiddle of it working:

http://jsfiddle.net/d5sdw/2/

You can then use the RegExp object to match:

if (yourString.match(realRegex)) { //do something

Update: Supports ? for single wildcard character.

Basically all this does is convert the whole string to non regex, and then makes sure that * gets mapped to .* and ? gets mapped to ., as they're the equivalent.

Answer 2

This should be pretty close.

yourVar.match(/.*\.js$/i)

meaning

• beginning of string is any character sequence .*
• followed by .js in the end \.js$
• do this case insensitive /i