How to find files that match a wildcard string in Java?

Question

Try FileUtils from Apache commons-io (listFiles and iterateFiles methods):

File dir = new File(".");
FileFilter fileFilter = new WildcardFileFilter("sample*.java");
File[] files = dir.listFiles(fileFilter);
for (int i = 0; i < files.length; i++) {
   System.out.println(files[i]);
}

To solve your issue with the TestX folders, I would first iterate through the list of folders:

File[] dirs = new File(".").listFiles(new WildcardFileFilter("Test*.java");
for (int i=0; i<dirs.length; i++) {
   File dir = dirs[i];
   if (dir.isDirectory()) {
       File[] files = dir.listFiles(new WildcardFileFilter("sample*.java"));
   }
}

Quite a 'brute force' solution but should work fine. If this doesn't fit your needs, you can always use the RegexFileFilter.

Consider DirectoryScanner from Apache Ant:

DirectoryScanner scanner = new DirectoryScanner();
scanner.setIncludes(new String[]{"**/*.java"});
scanner.setBasedir("C:/Temp");
scanner.setCaseSensitive(false);
scanner.scan();
String[] files = scanner.getIncludedFiles();

You'll need to reference ant.jar (~ 1.3 MB for ant 1.7.1).

Here are examples of listing files by pattern powered by Java 7 nio globbing and Java 8 lambdas:

    try (DirectoryStream<Path> dirStream = Files.newDirectoryStream(
            Paths.get(".."), "Test?/sample*.txt")) {
        dirStream.forEach(path -> System.out.println(path));
    }

or

    PathMatcher pathMatcher = FileSystems.getDefault()
        .getPathMatcher("regex:Test./sample\\w+\\.txt");
    try (DirectoryStream<Path> dirStream = Files.newDirectoryStream(
            new File("..").toPath(), pathMatcher::matches)) {
        dirStream.forEach(path -> System.out.println(path));
    }

Since Java 8 you can use Files#find method directly from java.nio.file.

public static Stream<Path> find(Path start,
                                int maxDepth,
                                BiPredicate<Path, BasicFileAttributes> matcher,
                                FileVisitOption... options)

Example usage

Files.find(startingPath,
           Integer.MAX_VALUE,
           (path, basicFileAttributes) -> path.toFile().getName().matches(".*.pom")
);

You could convert your wildcard string to a regular expression and use that with String's matches method. Following your example:

String original = "../Test?/sample*.txt";
String regex = original.replace("?", ".?").replace("*", ".*?");

This works for your examples:

Assert.assertTrue("../Test1/sample22b.txt".matches(regex));
Assert.assertTrue("../Test4/sample-spiffy.txt".matches(regex));

And counter-examples:

Assert.assertTrue(!"../Test3/sample2.blah".matches(regex));
Assert.assertTrue(!"../Test44/sample2.txt".matches(regex));

Might not help you right now, but JDK 7 is intended to have glob and regex file name matching as part of "More NIO Features".

The wildcard library efficiently does both glob and regex filename matching:

http://code.google.com/p/wildcard/

The implementation is succinct -- JAR is only 12.9 kilobytes.