Using wildcards

When thinking of filtering files you might want to use wildcards. For example:

• *.yaml - to filter by all files that end with the yaml extension
• my-file-??.* - to filter by files whose filename starts with “my-file-“ followed by two characters and any extension

In Javascript the closest that you have is regular expressions. Nevertheless wildcards are simpler to understand and use than regular expressions especially for filename filtering.

Simple use in OpenAF

So, starting with OpenAF version 20221216, you can use a built-in function (ow.format.string.wildcardTest) that will return true or false if a wildcard expression matches the provided string.

ow.loadFormat()
ow.format.string.wildcardTest("myfile.yaml", "*.yaml")
// true
ow.format.string.wildcardTest("myfile.json", "*.yaml")
// false

Filtering a list of files

You can use it in conjunction with io.listFiles to filter an array of files:

io.listFiles(".").files.filter(f => ow.format.string.wildcardTest(f.filepath, "*.yaml"))
// results in array with only the entries whose filenames end in ".yaml"

Case sensitive

The default behaviour is to be case insensitive:

ow.format.string.wildcardTest("myfile.yaml", "*.yaml")
// true
ow.format.string.wildcardTest("myfile.YAML", "*.yaml")
// true

But in some cases you might want for the expressions to be case sensitive. For that you can use a third argument of ow.format.string.wildcardTest:

> ow.format.string.wildcardTest("myfile.yaml", "*.yaml", true)
true
> ow.format.string.wildcardTest("myfile.YAML", "*.yaml", true)
false