Reg Exp won't make a match with metacharacters?

Question

Hi All,
I'm trying to implement a filefilter using regular expressions to allow wildcard searches. Here is the code I have so far. Works fine for a literal match, but if i enter a wildcard search (eg. abc123) it will not list any files, even though if I enter the full name for a file, it matches just fine. Anyone got any ideas because I'm just comming up blank?
thanks!
package dbmanager2;
import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import java.util.regex.*;
* @author nkelleh
public class LotDialog
    // Declare variables
    private String[] dirFiles;
    // Class constructor
    public LotDialog(String path, String name)
        // Create new file object based on path name given
        File dir = new File(path);
        // Assign file names to string array
        dirFiles = dir.list(new stdfFilter(name));
    public void printFiles()
        for (String files : dirFiles)
            System.out.println("File is " + files );
    class stdfFilter implements FilenameFilter {
        Pattern pattern;
        public stdfFilter(String search)
            // Replace wildcard, '*', with reg exp, '.*'
            search = search.replaceAll("\\*", ".*");
            search = search.replaceAll("\\?", ".");
            pattern = Pattern.compile(search);
            System.out.println(pattern.pattern());
        public boolean accept(File dir, String name)
            if (new File(dir,name).isDirectory())
                return false;
            else
                // Return true if a match is found
                Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(dir.getName());
                return matcher.matches();               
}

Answer 1

LeWalrus wrote:
Hi All,
I'm trying to implement a filefilter using regular expressions to allow wildcard searches. Here is the code I have so far. Works fine for a literal match, but if i enter a wildcard search (eg. abc123) it will not list any files, even though if I enter the full name for a file, it matches just fine. Anyone got any ideas because I'm just comming up blank?
...Try debugging your code. A good place to start is to print the following to see where things go wrong:
public boolean accept(File dir, String name)
  if (new File(dir,name).isDirectory())
    System.out.println("Ignoring: "+new File(dir,name));
    return false;
  else
    Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(dir.getName()); // shouldnt that be 'name' instead of 'dir'?
    System.out.println("Accept: "+dir.getName()+"? "+matcher.matches());
    return matcher.matches();               
}