Need to perform Wildcard (*,?, etc) search on a string using Regex

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

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.$.

Answer 2

You can do a simple wildcard mach without RegEx using a Visual Basic function called LikeString.

using Microsoft.VisualBasic; using Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices;  if (Operators.LikeString("This is just a test", "*just*", CompareMethod.Text)) {   Console.WriteLine("This matched!"); } 

If you use CompareMethod.Text it will compare case-insensitive. For case-sensitive comparison, you can use CompareMethod.Binary.

More info here: http://www.henrikbrinch.dk/Blog/2012/02/14/Wildcard-matching-in-C

MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.visualbasic.compilerservices.operators.likestring%28v=vs.100%29.ASPX