Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!oberon!cit-vax!elroy!jplpub1!jbrown From: jbrown@jplpub1.jpl.nasa.gov (Jordan Brown) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Re: Wild Card Searches Message-ID: <7343@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> Date: 7 Jul 88 09:47:35 GMT References: <165300001@uiucdcsb> <7158@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> Sender: uucp@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov Reply-To: jbrown@jplpub1.UUCP (Jordan Brown) Organization: Me? Organized? Lines: 16 In article <7158@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> kalra@cit-vax.UUCP (Devendra Kalra) writes: >Could someone point me to references to efficient methods to carry out >wild card searches for records that match. > >Wild card patterns could be in general any regular expressions. References >to more restricted patterns also welcome. Kernighan and Plauger talk about it in Software Tools. No doubt there are other, more scholarly, references, but ST is pretty practical. I use a simple obvious recursive algorithm to do * and ? matching like the shell does (but not []), and it's quite acceptably fast when you consider that it doesn't really have to recurse often, and there's a lot of overhead involved in record fetches.