Nearly regex with glob

Question

PHP's glob seems to support a limited-range of regex-like syntax.

I would like to catch hello<somethingherebutonlyifitbeginsby#>.txt, i.e.:

• hello.txt: ok
• hello#you.txt: ok
• hellome.txt: not ok

I tried

glob('hello#?*.txt', GLOB_BRACE);

but it doesn't work. How can we correct it?

Answer 1

You can write it like that:

glob('hello{#*,}.txt', GLOB_BRACE);

where {aa,bb} is an alternation (feature available with the GLOB_BRACE and with OSes that support it).

Answer 2

glob's regex also supports character classes and negative character classes, using the syntax [] and [^]. It will match any one character inside [] or match any one character that is not in [^].

hello.txt: ok
hello#you.txt: ok
hellome.txt: not ok

//[] include chars. and #
var_dump(glob('hello[.#]*txt', GLOB_BRACE));

array(2) {
[0]=>
 string(13) "hello#you.txt"
[1]=>
 string(9) "hello.txt"
}


>ls hello* 
hellome.txt  hello.txt  hello#you.txt