views:

212

answers:

2

What's the easiest way of doing simple pattern matching a la .something.com something.com/ something.com/somefolder/*.jpg in the iPhone SDK? At this point it looks like I'm going to have to use a regular expression library of some sort, which is really overkill when all I need is simple wildcard matching. None of the standard NSString methods seem to be available on the iPhone.

+2  A: 

For the equivalent of a matching expression with a single wildcard (*), you can use NSString's hasPrefix: & hasSuffix:.

if ([string hasPrefix: @"something.com/somefolder/"] 
     && [string hasSuffix: @".jpg"])
{
   // string matches pattern: "something.com/somefolder/*.jpg"
}
tedge
Guess I should've specified an example with multiple wildcards as well. Additionally, this would be a real pain if the patterns used for matching aren't known up front, in which case one would need to first parse the pattern itself, so this isn't really the solution I was looking for.
Joonas Trussmann
+1  A: 

Go the regular expression route: RegexKitLite / RegexKitLite-3.3.tar.bz2. It's not an overkill, this is exactly the kind of problem that regular expressions are good at.

johne