wild card matching for desktop search

[djshanx]

hello all,

i'm asking for help once again in developing my search engine. i want to add the feature of wildcard matching in my desktop search. if a user enters *.txt as input, the search results should contain all the files which have a .txt extension. also, if a user enters sha* as input, the results should display all the files starting from sha. can anyone please help me out with this issue? i have no idea by which this can be implemented. hoping for an early reply.

regards,
djshanx.

[nspils]

If you are looking to filter by file names, including extension, look at the java.io.FileFilter and java.io.FilenameFilter interfaces and javax.swing.filechooser.FileFilter class (if you are using a Swing filechooser).

Your wildcard input "contains" could be a part of your coding of your implementation of the FilenameFilter, the only method of which returns a boolean value indicating whether or not the given filename should be accepted (added to the list of files), based on the rules you define. You could use a Pattern, generated from the input, to test this.