Joker -- Wildcards for Ruby

Ruby
1

Hi folks,
I’m proudly presenting:

Joker

http://karottenreibe.github.com/joker

Joker is a Wildcard implementation for Ruby.

Features

  • Behaves much like Regexp
  • * and ? as wildcard characters
  • \ for escaping
  • \a matches \a, but not a
  • Wildcards must always match whole string
  • Wildcards can be case insensitive

Visit the website to see a small example etc.

Greetz!

2

On Sep 9, 2009, at 12:55 PM, Fabian S. wrote:

  • Behaves much like Regexp
  • * and ? as wildcard characters
  • \ for escaping
  • \a matches \a, but not a
  • Wildcards must always match whole string
  • Wildcards can be case insensitive

Can you suggest why someone would use this instead of a regular
expression?

James Edward G. II

3

because “non-computer people” (:slight_smile: might find wildcards more easily
understandable than regular expressions.

This is of course not meant as a replacement for regexps when you’re
writing code but rather as a way to interface with people who don’t
know about regexps

think directory listings, search queries etc.

Greetz!

2009/9/9 James Edward G. II [email protected]

4

At 2009-09-09 01:55PM, “Fabian S.” wrote:

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

Hi folks,
I’m proudly presenting:

Joker

http://karottenreibe.github.com/joker

Joker is a Wildcard implementation for Ruby.

Note that these are known as “glob patterns” – you might want to update
your documentation accordingly
(glob (programming) - Wikipedia)

Also, your rdocs seem to be missing a few backslashes:

* '?' matches a single character
* '*' matches any number of characters, including 0

(1) * ‘’ matches a literal '’
* ‘?’ matches a literal ‘?’
(2) * '' matches a literal ''

1 should be: ‘*’ matches a literal ‘*’
2 should be: ‘\’ matches a literal ''

You could generalize by saying:
* ‘\x’ matches the literal character ‘x’, even if ‘x’ is a wildcard
character.

You haven’t implemented bracket expressions: ‘[cb]at*’ should match
‘catch’ and ‘batch’ but not ‘match’

Tcl has had this functionality for years, and it’s very handy to be able
to do a quick glob comparison on a string when you don’t need the full
power of a regular expression.
(string manual page - Tcl Built-In Commands)

5

Whoops overlooked one:

You could generalize by saying:

  • ‘\x’ matches the literal character ‘x’, even if ‘x’ is a wildcard
    character.

That’s exactly not what my implementation does. Since I had the library
in
mind as
a way to interact with users who don’t know about Regular Expressions, I
wanted
to keep it as simple as possible.

Thus, the Ruby String “fo\o” fed to the Wildcard class would be
equivalent
to /^fo\o$/
but I’m not sure if that was a wise decision. The reasoning behind it
was,
that users woudn’t
have to type things like
C:\foo\bar\goo
but rather only
C:\foo\bar\goo
since f b and g are no special characters.

Does that make sense? What do you think? Which approach to take or
should
there be an option
and if so what’s the wiser default?
Greetz!

6

Note that these are known as “glob patterns” – you might want to update
your documentation accordingly (glob (programming) - Wikipedia)

Ah, thx, I’ve been searching for the correct name of these but couldn’t
find
it.
The only thing I’ve ever heard was “Wildcard”.

2 should be: ‘\’ matches a literal ''

You could generalize by saying:

  • ‘\x’ matches the literal character ‘x’, even if ‘x’ is a wildcard
    character.

I’ll do that.

You haven’t implemented bracket expressions: ‘[cb]at*’ should match
‘catch’ and ‘batch’ but not ‘match’

I’ll look into that.

Thanks for the feedback!

7

Just a thought… ruby already has globbing functions in dir.c, but they
apparently work only on dirs. Maybe they could be abstracted in to a
library that works on strings or arrays of strings.

8

Just a thought… ruby already has globbing functions in dir.c, but they
apparently work only on dirs. Maybe they could be abstracted in to a library
that works on strings or arrays of strings.

Honestly: I have no idea what’s going on in that file…
That’s just too complicated C magic whuzzing around in there.

But a problem with that approach – as far as I can tell – is that
matching a glob against a string and matching it against the
file system are 2 different things. Especially since “/” or “” have
special meaning in file systems and allow for splitting of the glob
string into small subsections, whose matching against files is much
easier.
Also dir.c has the special “**” glob, which doesn’t make and sense
in string matching.

Greetz!