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Minimatch

A minimal matching utility.

This is a port of Node.js' minimatch.

Usage

First, install from NuGet:

dotnet-cli> dotnet add package Minimatch
nuget> nuget install Minimatch
PM> Install-Package Minimatch
packet> paket add 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" ** matching

See:

  • 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 the NoNegate 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 the NoComment flag to suppress this behavior.

The double-star character ** is supported by default, unless the NoGlobStar 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 match a/x/y/b, but a/**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 the nullglob 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.

License

MIT