Ubuntu Manpage: uwildmat, uwildmat_simple, uwildmat_poison

Provided by: inn2_2.7.3~20241006-1_amd64

NAME

       uwildmat, uwildmat_simple, uwildmat_poison - Perform wildmat matching

SYNOPSIS

           #include <inn/libinn.h>

           bool uwildmat(const char *text, const char *pattern);

           bool uwildmat_simple(const char *text, const char *pattern);

           enum uwildmat uwildmat_poison(const char *text, const char *pattern);

DESCRIPTION

       uwildmat compares text against the wildmat expression pattern, returning true if and only
       if the expression matches the text.  "@" has no special meaning in pattern when passed to
       uwildmat.  Both text and pattern are assumed to be in the UTF-8 character encoding,
       although malformed UTF-8 sequences are treated in a way that attempts to be mostly
       compatible with single-octet character sets like ISO 8859-1.  (In other words, if you try
       to match ISO 8859-1 text with these routines everything should work as expected unless the
       ISO 8859-1 text contains valid UTF-8 sequences, which thankfully is somewhat rare.)

       uwildmat_simple is identical to uwildmat except that neither "!"  nor "," have any special
       meaning and pattern is always treated as a single pattern.  This function exists solely to
       support legacy interfaces like NNTP's XPAT command, and should be avoided when
       implementing new features.

       uwildmat_poison works similarly to uwildmat, except that "@" as the first character of one
       of the patterns in the expression (see below) "poisons" the match if it matches.
       uwildmat_poison returns UWILDMAT_MATCH if the expression matches the text, UWILDMAT_FAIL
       if it doesn't, and UWILDMAT_POISON if the expression doesn't match because a poisoned
       pattern matched the text.  These enumeration constants are defined in the inn/libinn.h
       header.

WILDMAT EXPRESSIONS

A wildmat expression follows rules similar to those of shell filename wildcards but with
some additions and changes. A wildmat expression is composed of one or more wildmat
patterns separated by commas. Each character in the wildmat pattern matches a literal
occurrence of that same character in the text, with the exception of the following
metacharacters:

? Matches any single character (including a single UTF-8 multibyte character, so "?"
can match more than one byte).

* Matches any sequence of zero or more characters.

\ Turns off any special meaning of the following character; the following character
will match itself in the text. "\" will escape any character, including another
backslash or a comma that otherwise would separate a pattern from the next pattern
in an expression. Note that "\" is not special inside a character range (no
metacharacters are).

[...] A character set, which matches any single character that falls within that set.
The presence of a character between the brackets adds that character to the set;
for example, "[amv]" specifies the set containing the characters "a", "m", and
"v". A range of characters may be specified using "-"; for example, "[0-5abc]" is
equivalent to "[012345abc]". The order of characters is as defined in the UTF-8
character set, and if the start character of such a range falls after the ending
character of the range in that ranking the results of attempting a match with that
pattern are undefined.

In order to include a literal "]" character in the set, it must be the first
character of the set (possibly following "^"); for example, "[]a]" matches either
"]" or "a". To include a literal "-" character in the set, it must be either the
first or the last character of the set. Backslashes have no special meaning
inside a character set, nor do any other of the wildmat metacharacters.

[^...] A negated character set. Follows the same rules as a character set above, but
matches any character not contained in the set. So, for example, "[^]-]" matches
any character except "]" and "-".

In addition, "!" (and possibly "@") have special meaning as the first character of a
pattern; see below.

When matching a wildmat expression against some text, each comma-separated pattern is
matched in order from left to right. In order to match, the pattern must match the whole
text; in regular expression terminology, it's implicitly anchored at both the beginning
and the end. For example, the pattern "a" matches only the text "a"; it doesn't match
"ab" or "ba" or even "aa". If none of the patterns match, the whole expression doesn't
match. Otherwise, whether the expression matches is determined entirely by the rightmost
matching pattern; the expression matches the text if and only if the rightmost matching
pattern is not negated.

For example, consider the text "news.misc". The expression "*" matches this text, of
course, as does "comp.*,news.*" (because the second pattern matches). "news.*,!news.misc"
does not match this text because both patterns match, meaning that the rightmost takes
precedence, and the rightmost matching pattern is negated. "news.*,!news.misc,*.misc"
does match this text, since the rightmost matching pattern is not negated.

Note that the expression "!news.misc" can't match anything. Either the pattern doesn't
match, in which case no patterns match and the expression doesn't match, or the pattern
does match, in which case because it's negated the expression doesn't match.
"*,!news.misc", on the other hand, is a useful pattern that matches anything except
"news.misc".

"!" has significance only as the first character of a pattern; anywhere else in the
pattern, it matches a literal "!" in the text like any other non-metacharacter.

If the uwildmat_poison interface is used, then "@" behaves the same as "!" except that if
an expression fails to match because the rightmost matching pattern began with "@",
UWILDMAT_POISON is returned instead of UWILDMAT_FAIL.

If the uwildmat_simple interface is used, the matching rules are the same as above except
that none of "!", "@", or "," have any special meaning at all and only match those literal
characters.

BUGS

       All of these functions internally convert the passed arguments to const unsigned char
       pointers.  The only reason why they take regular char pointers instead of unsigned char is
       for the convenience of INN and other callers that may not be using unsigned char
       everywhere they should.  In a future revision, the public interface should be changed to
       just take unsigned char pointers.

HISTORY