DotNet.Glob

A fast (probably the fastest) globbing library for .NET.

Branch	Build Status	NuGet
Master
Develop

This library does not use Regex - I wanted to make something much faster. The latest benchmarks show that DotNet.Glob signficantly outperforms Regex. The benchmarks use BenchmarkDotNet and can be located inside this repo. Just dotnet run them. Some Benchmark results have also been published on the wiki: https://github.com/dazinator/DotNet.Glob/wiki/Benchmarks-(vs-Compiled-Regex)

Usage

Install the NuGet package. Install-Package DotNet.Glob
Add using statement: using DotNet.Globbing;
Parse a glob from a pattern

 var glob = Glob.Parse("p?th/*a[bcd]b[e-g]a[1-4][!wxyz][!a-c][!1-3].*");
 var isMatch = glob.IsMatch("pAth/fooooacbfa2vd4.txt");

Parsing options.

By default, when your glob pattern is parsed, DotNet.Glob will only parse literal characters which are valid for path / directory names. These are:

Any Letter or Digit
., , !, #, -, ;, =, @, ~, _, :

This is optimised for matching against paths / directory strings. However starting in 1.6.4 you can override this behaviour so that you can match on arbitrary string containing other characters:

            // Overide the default options globally for all matche:
            GlobParseOptions.Default.AllowInvalidPathCharacters = true;
			DotNet.Globbing.Glob.Parse("\"Stuff*").IsMatch("\"Stuff"); // true;

You can also just set this behaviour on a per match basis:

    var globParseOptions = new GlobParseOptions() { AllowInvalidPathCharacters = true };
    DotNet.Globbing.Glob.Parse("\"Stuff*", globParseOptions).IsMatch("\"Stuff"); // true;

Build a glob fluently

You can also use the GlobBuilder class if you wish to build up a glob using a fluent syntax. This is also more efficient as it avoids having to parse the glob from a string pattern.

So to build the following glob pattern: /foo?\\*[abc][!1-3].txt:

  var glob = new GlobBuilder()
                .PathSeperator()
                .Literal("foo")
                .AnyCharacter()
                .PathSeperator(PathSeperatorKind.BackwardSlash)
                .Wildcard()
                .OneOf('a', 'b', 'c')
                .NumberNotInRange('1', '3')
                .Literal(".txt")
                .ToGlob();

   var isMatch = glob.IsMatch(@"/fooa\\barrra4.txt"); // returns true.

Patterns

The following patterns are supported (from wikipedia):

Wildcard	Description	Example	Matches	Does not match
*	matches any number of any characters including none	Law*	Law, Laws, or Lawyer
?	matches any single character	?at	Cat, cat, Bat or bat	at
[abc]	matches one character given in the bracket	[CB]at	Cat or Bat	cat or bat
[a-z]	matches one character from the range given in the bracket	Letter[0-9]	Letter0, Letter1, Letter2 up to Letter9	Letters, Letter or Letter10
[!abc]	matches one character that is not given in the bracket	[!C]at	Bat, bat, or cat	Cat
[!a-z]	matches one character that is not from the range given in the bracket	Letter[!3-5]	Letter1, Letter2, Letter6 up to Letter9 and Letterx etc.	Letter3, Letter4, Letter5 or Letterxx

In addition, DotNet Glob also supports:

Wildcard	Description	Example	Matches	Does not match
`**`	matches any number of path / directory segments. When used must be the only contents of a segment.	/*/some.	/foo/bar/bah/some.txt, /some.txt, or /foo/some.txt

Advanced Usages

Match Generation

Given a glob, you can generate random matches, or non matches, for that glob. For example, given the glob pattern /f?o/bar/**/*.txt you could generate matching strings like /foo/bar/ajawd/awdaw/adw-ad.txt or random non matching strings.

  var dotnetGlob = Glob.Parse(pattern);
  var generator = new GlobMatchStringGenerator(dotnetGlob.Tokens);

  for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
  {
          var testString = generator.GenerateRandomMatch();
          var result = dotnetGlob.IsMatch(testString);
          // result is always true.

          // generate a non match.
          testString = generator.GenerateRandomNonMatch();
          var result = dotnetGlob.IsMatch(testString);
           // result is always false.
  }

Match Analysis

The IsMatch method just returns you a boolean. If you require more in-depth information about the match including which tokens were matched, or failed to match, you can do this:

 MatchInfo match = glob.Match(somestring);

You can then inspect the MatchInfo which holds all of those useful details.

Alanoll/DotNet.Glob