Matching filenames with wildcards. See also System.Path.Glob for support for generating lists of files based on wildcards.

Inspired by fnmatch.py, part of the Python standard library.

Written by John Goerzen, jgoerzen@complete.org

The input wildcard for functions in this module is expected to be in the standard style of Posix shells.

That is:

? matches exactly one character
\* matches zero or more characters
[list] matches any character in list
[!list] matches any character not in the list

The returned regular expression will always end in $ but never begins with ^, making it suitable for appending to the end of paths. If you want to match a given filename directly, you should prepend the ^ character to the returned value from this function.

Please note:

• Neither the path separator (the slash or backslash) nor the period carry any special meaning for the functions in this module. That is, * will match / in a filename. If this is not the behavior you want, you probably want System.Path.Glob instead of this module.
• Unlike the Unix shell, filenames that begin with a period are not ignored by this module. That is, *.txt will match .test.txt.
• This module does not current permit escaping of special characters.