Minimatch
A minimal matching utility.
This is a port of Node.js' minimatch.
Usage
First, install from NuGet:
PM> Install-Package Minimatch
Just parse the pattern into a Minimatcher
instance, then call the IsMatch
function to check whether an input matches it. You can also use the Filter()
convenience method to filter a list of paths and find those that match the pattern.
var mm = new Minimatcher(searchPattern);
if (mm.IsMatch(somePath)) {
// The path matches! Do some cool stuff!
}
var matchingPaths = mm.Filter(allPaths);
Minimatch also has static
versions of these methods that take a pattern a string. However, these methods will re-parse the pattern on every invocation, making them slower.
On Windows-style paths
Minimatch's syntax was designed for Linux-style paths (with forward slashes only). In particular, it uses the backslash as an escape character, so it cannot simply accept Windows-style paths. My C# version preserves this behavior.
To suppress this, and allow both backslashes and forward slashes as path separators (in patterns or input), set the AllowWindowsPaths
option:
var mm = new Minimatcher(searchPattern, new Options { AllowWindowsPaths = true });
Passing this option will disable escape characters entirely.
Quoting the original documentation:
Features
Supports these glob features:
- Brace Expansion
- Extended glob matching
- "Globstar"
**
matchingSee:
man sh
man bash
man 3 fnmatch
man 5 gitignore
Comparisons to other fnmatch/glob implementations
While strict compliance with the existing standards is a worthwhile goal, some discrepancies exist between minimatch and other implementations, and are intentional.
If the pattern starts with a
!
character, then it is negated. Set theNoNegate
flag to suppress this behavior, and treat leading!
characters normally. This is perhaps relevant if you wish to start the pattern with a negative extglob pattern like!(a|B)
. Multiple!
characters at the start of a pattern will negate the pattern multiple times.If a pattern starts with
#
, then it is treated as a comment, and will not match anything. Use\#
to match a literal#
at the start of a line, or set theNoComment
flag to suppress this behavior.The double-star character
**
is supported by default, unless theNoGlobStar
flag is set. This is supported in the manner of bsdglob and bash 4.1, where**
only has special significance if it is the only thing in a path part. That is,a/**/b
will matcha/x/y/b
, buta/**b
will not. Note that this is different from the way that `is handled by ruby's
Dir` class.**If an escaped pattern has no matches, and the
NoNull
flag is set, then minimatch.match returns the pattern as-provided, rather than interpreting the character escapes. For example,Minimatcher.Filter(new string[0], "\\*a\\?", new Options { NoNull = true })
will return"\\*a\\?"
rather than"*a?"
. This is akin to setting thenullglob
option in bash, except that it does not resolve escaped pattern characters.If brace expansion is not disabled, then it is performed before any other interpretation of the glob pattern. Thus, a pattern like
+(a|{b),c)}
, which would not be valid in bash or zsh, is expanded first into the set of+(a|b)
and+(a|c)
, and those patterns are checked for validity. Since those two are valid, matching proceeds.