threads / discuss / 36068

fnmatch vs regex

Subject: fnmatch vs regex

## tl;dr

3 messages between Mar 5, 2014 and Mar 5, 2014.

replies: 2people: 3as markdown or json

Vincenzo di Cicco· Mar 5, 2014, 19:55 UTC · lore
Hi there, I'm NaN.
Recently I enrolled to this mailing list thanks to the GSoC.
I've looked the Ideas Page but -unfortunately- some projects are very
difficult for me.
I've looked the source code and I've seen that to perform a search
with a pattern to the branches list (and other commands) git uses
fnmatch() and so supports the glob pattern.
I haven't never massively used the branches or the tags to have the
necessity to filter in a particolar way the results, and the asterisk
has always worked very well.
But: why the decision to support the Blob Pattern instead of the
Regular Expressions?
With your experiences can a patch like this improve this side?

Thanks for the awesome work, NaN

Junio C Hamano· Mar 5, 2014, 21:27 UTC · re: Vincenzo di Cicco · lore

Re: fnmatch vs regex

Vincenzo di Cicco <enzodicicco@gmail.com> writes:
> But: why the decision to support the Blob Pattern instead of the
> Regular Expressions?
s/Blob/glob/;

Matching pathnames using fnmatch/glob is a fine UNIX tradition; because we generally consider refnames also as "pathname-like" things, we use fnmatch for them, too (what we actually use is wildmatch, which can be thought of as a natural evolution of it).

Jacopo Notarstefano· Mar 5, 2014, 21:28 UTC · re: Vincenzo di Cicco · lore

Re: fnmatch vs regex

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 8:55 PM, Vincenzo di Cicco <enzodicicco@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there, I'm NaN.
> Recently I enrolled to this mailing list thanks to the GSoC.
> I've looked the Ideas Page but -unfortunately- some projects are very
> difficult for me.
Hi Vincenzo!

I also got interested in contributing to Git because of GSoC. I encourage you to try doing a microproject: the coding part can be *really* trivial. For example, mine just involved deleting lines (after, of course, explaining why they weren't needed anymore). If you are having trouble following the instructions in Documentation/SubmittingPatches I recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLBrBBImJt4.

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