Re: Using wildcards in string comparison

FROM : Charilaos Skiadas
DATE : Tue Apr 12 01:27:30 2005

On Apr 11, 2005, at 3:24 PM, jjoonathan wrote:

> Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
>

>>
>> On Apr 11, 2005, at 12:58 AM, Jiva DeVoe wrote:
>>

>>> Sounds like you probably want some regexp capabilities.
>>>
>>> I think (have not searched google) that omni has some frameworks
>>> that  do this.  If not, I think MOKit does.
>>>
>>> On Apr 10, 2005, at 1:06 PM, jjoonathan wrote:
>>>

>>>> I am making an app which allows an array to be searched by a string
>>>>  which contains wildcards (the *, and ?, etc). I am currently using
>>>>  the isLike: method of NSString, but I ran into a problem. I want
>>>> the  search string to be able to contain [ and ] characters that
>>>> are not  part of the pattern. So, @"*[ABC]*" would match
>>>> @"123[ABC]456", not  @"123[A]456", @"123[B]456", or @"123[C]456".
>>>> Any ideas? Is there  another method which allows comparisons just
>>>> by wildcards?

>>>

>>
>> You can try escaping the brackets, i.e. maybe this might work: 
>> @"123\[ABC\]456". Haven't tried it though, just the obvious guess.
>>

>>>> Thanks in advance,
>>>> jjoonathan
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>>> --
>>> Jiva DeVoe
>>> http://www.devoesquared.com
>>> PowerCard - Intuitive Project Management for Mac OS X
>>>
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>> Haris
>>
>>

> Thanks for your help, but I just found out it works for me to replace
> all of the braces with curly ones and then do the comparisons, and
> that works. Now, however, it seems that isCaseInsensitiveLike: goes
> into an infinite loop sometimes. Its really confusing, because its
> never on the same string (these are NSMutableStrings I am comparing,
> by the way, that are from three to twenty characters long). Is this a
> common mistake that I am making? Or is this something that is just a
> bug and I should go with the other frameworks (I would prefer to not
> use any non-apple frameworks, but if I must, I must...)


Is there a reason you are not using NSScanner for this? I have never
used isLike and friends before, in fact, I haven't heard of anyone
using them before either. If the strings really have the simple form
you described above, I would just roll my own method for it.
Ok, maybe NSScanner might be too heavy for the job, but just wrap it
around your own method, and if you see it slows down your app during
the optimization phase, you can then look for another way.

Best,
Haris