Hello,

I've written a TMask class family and I would like to know if it could be of any interest for the fpc code base, if there is interest I must write some unit test code but if there is no interest I'll not write it ;-)

There is a TMask class in LazUtils but it lacks some features and has an speed problem in large strings when 2 or more '*' are involved.

My TMask family is:

TMaskAnsi, TMaskUTF8 and TMaskUnicode:

This three classes hold the logic for each "char" space, ANSI 1 char, UTF8 1 to 6 bytes and Unicode 2 or 4 bytes.

Available wildcards are:

* = Any text.
? = Just one character unit.
[abc] = Anyone of "abc"
[a-c] = Anyone of "abc" (range)
[!ab] = Negate a match "a" or "b"
[!a-c] = Negate a match group
[?] = One character unit or none.
\? = Escape character '\' (next char is a literal "?")

So the usual masks, nothing new under the sun.

TMaskAnsi does not allow high chars ranges, so "[á-ú]" is not valid as characters in ANSI usually does not follow expected order. UTF8 and Unicode allows them as usually they are in the "expected order".

Any feature can be toggled, so it can be set to ignore ranges, in example, so "[a-z]" will be interpreted as "a" or "-" or "z". Also the escape char can be configured, but it must be ASCII < 127.

Derived from this classes there are:

TMaskAnsiWindows, TMaskUTF8Windows and TMaskUnicodeWindows.

This classes implements the special wildcards of Windows, inherited from CP/M, like "*." must match all files without extension, "*.*" must match any file, "file.ext" must match "file.extension" or "file??.ext" must match "file.ext", "file1.ext" and "file1a.ext".

This special cases, are called Quirks and can be enabled or disabled one by one like ".ext" which in the past matches any file with ".ext" as extension, but this not happen in recent Windows versions, so in the code is disabled by default.

Thank you for reading such amount of text, have a nice day.

Hello José,

FPC has 2 units with similar functionality, fpmasks (in fpindexer) and maskutils (in fcl-base).

I think one of these units could be extended with extra functions;
I don't think we should introduce new units.

For maskutils there are already some tests, so if you write tests for your classes, you could extend tcmaskutils.pp (directory fcl-base/tests)

So If you prepare a patch and upload it to the bugtracker, I'll look at it - or someone else...

Michael.