php string matching with wildcard *?

Question

I want to give the possibility to match string with wildcard *.

Example

$mystring = \'dir/folder1/file\';
$pattern = \'dir/*/file\';

string         


        

Answer 1

.+?

Causes non-greedy matching for all characters. This is NOT equal to "*" becuase it will not match the empty string.

The following pattern will match the empty string too:

.*?

so...

stringMatchWithWildcard ("hello", "hel*lo"); // will give true