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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T02:34:22+00:00

I’m looking for simple and powerful way to implement Windows flavoured * and ?

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I’m looking for simple and powerful way to implement Windows flavoured * and ? wildcards matching in strings.

BeginsWith(), EndsWith() too simple to cover all cases, while translating wildcards expressions to regex’es will look to complex and I’m not sure about performance.

A happy medium wanted.

EDIT: I’m trying to parse .gitignore file and match the same files, as Git does. This means:

  • File should be out of repository’s index (so I’m checking file’s path against one stored in index)
  • Number of patterns in .gitignore can be large;
  • Number of files to check might also be large.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The equivalents of the Windows wildcards ? and * in regex are just . and .*.

    [Edit] Given your new edit (stating that you’re looking for actual files), I would skip the translation altogether and let .Net do the searching using Directory.GetFiles().

    (note that, for some reason, passing a ? into Directory.GetFiles() matches “zero or one characters,” whereas in Windows it always matches exactly one character)

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