CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#regexwpfwildcardselection
A_Binary_Story
A_Binary_Story

Reputation: 95

C# Wildcard for specific amount of characters

I would like to select all documents which have exact 4 "unknown" characters at the place where the asterisk is: (for example "****" could be "2018")

foreach (string s in Directory.GetFiles(@"C:\Users\MyUser\Documents\ExampleTitle ****.xml").Select(Path.GetFileName))
{
    // Do something!
}

I know the asterisk * will match every character, no matter how many characters are between the asterisk. But as described, I want to select only results with a specific amount of unknown characters.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 946

Answers (1)

Wiktor Stribiżew
Wiktor Stribiżew

Reputation: 627468

You cannot specify wildcards in the path argument, you need to provide the path and a search pattern, see GetFiles(String, String).

The search pattern accepts two wildcards, ? for a single char and * for any amount of chars. Hence, you need

Directory.GetFiles(@"C:\Users\MyUser\Documents", "ExampleTitle ????.xml")

If you plan to match only digits there you will have to use a regex to filter the results of Directory.GetFiles:

var fileList = Directory.GetFiles(@"C:\Users\MyUser\Documents", "*.xml")
        .Where(p => Regex.IsMatch(Path.GetFileName(p), @"^ExampleTitle [0-9]{4}\.xml$"))
        .ToList();

Here, Directory.GetFiles(@"C:\Users\MyUser\Documents", "*.xml") will fetch all XML files in the given folder, and those that entirely match the ExampleTitle <4-DIGITS>.xml pattern will be returned then with the Where clause.

Upvotes: 3

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