FindFirstFile Multiple file types

Question

Is it possible to use Windows API function FindFirstFile to search for multiple file types, e.g *.txt and *.doc at the same time?

I tried to separate patterns with '\0' but it does not work - it searches only the first pattern (I guess, that's because it thinks that '\0' is the end of string).

Of course, I can call FindFirstFile with *.* pattern and then check my patterns or call it for every pattern, but I don't like this idea - I will use it only if there no other solutions.

Answer 1

This is not supported. Run it twice with different wildcards. Or use *.* and filter the result. This is definitely the better choice, wildcards are ambiguous anyway due to support for legacy MS-DOS 8.3 filenames. A wildcard like *.doc will find both .doc and .docx files for example. A filename like longfilename.docx also creates an entry named LONGFI~1.DOC

Answer 2

The MSDN docs mention nothing about FindFirstFile allowing multiple search patterns, hence it doesn't exist.

In this case your best bet is to scan using an open selection (like C:\\some directory\* or *) and then filter based on WIN32_FIND_DATA's cFileName member, using strrchr (or the appropriate Unicode variant) to find the extension. It should run pretty fast for the small set of characters that make up a file extension.

If you know the that all the extensions are say 3 characters, you should be able to mask it off as *.??? to speed things up.