Globbing paths without walking the tree! Elixir and Erlang provide wildcard functions in the stdlib. But these will walk the directory tree. If you simply want to test whether a file path matches a glob, ExMinimatch is for you.

Quick examples:

iex> import ExMinimatch
nil

iex> match("**/*{1..2}{a,b}.{png,jpg}", "asdf/pic2a.jpg")
true

iex> match("*.+(bar|foo)", "bar.foo")
true

iex> ["me.jpg", "images/me.png", "images/you.svg"] |> filter("**/*.{png,jpg}")
["me.jpg", "images/me.png"]

Compiled forms below allows us to cache the %ExMinimatcher{} struct when used against large number of files repeated.

iex> compile("**/*{1..2}{a,b}.{png,jpg}") |> match("asdf/pic2a.jpg")
true

iex> ["me.jpg", "images/me.png", "images/you.svg"] |> filter(compile("**/*.{png,jpg}"))
["me.jpg", "images/me.png"]

ExMinimatch is a port of the minimatch javascript project. It is a close port but not exactly the same. See "Comparison to minimatch.js" section below.

Supports these glob features:

• Brace Expansion
• Extended glob matching
• "Globstar" ** matching

See:

• man sh
• man bash
• man 3 fnmatch
• man 5 gitignore

compile, match, and filter all have forms that take an options argument (as a map %{}). The following are the explanations. By default, all fo these are false.

Possible values are :info, and :debug. If set, will dump information into repl. :debug dumps more.

Do not expand {a,b} and {1..3} brace sets.

Disable ** matching against multiple folder names.

Allow patterns to match filenames starting with a period, even if the pattern does not explicitly have a period in that spot.

Note that by default, a/**/b will not match a/.d/b, unless dot is set, e.g. match("a/**/b", "a/.d/b", %{dot: true})

Disable "extglob" style patterns like +(a|b).

Perform a case-insensitive match.

If set, then patterns without slashes will be matched against the basename of the path if it contains slashes. For example, a?b would match the path /xyz/123/acb, but not /xyz/acb/123.

Suppress the behavior of treating # at the start of a pattern as a comment.

Suppress the behavior of treating leading ! character as negation.

minimatch.js converts a glob into a list of regular expressions. However, when it comes to matching, one can choose to use minimatch.match or use the complete regular expression generated by minimatch.makeRe to test it against a file pattern. Unfortunately, the 2 approaches are inconsistent. Notably the full regular expression based approach has a few important pieces missing. Therefore, here we implement the first approach. For detail, take a look at ExMinimatcher.Matcher.