Ant path style patterns

Question

What are the rules for Ant path style patterns.

The Ant site itself is surprisingly uninformative.

Answer 1

I suppose you mean how to use path patterns

If it is about whether to use slashes or backslashes these will be translated to path-separators on the platform used during execution-time.

Answer 2

As @user11153 mentioned, Spring's AntPathMatcher implements and documents the basics of Ant-style path pattern matching.

In addition, Java 7's nio APIs added some built in support for basic pattern matching via FileSystem.getPathMatcher

Answer 3

Most upvoted answer by @user11153 using tables for a more readable format.

---

The mapping matches URLs using the following rules:

+-----------------+---------------------------------------------------------+
| Wildcard        |            Description                                  |
+-----------------+---------------------------------------------------------+
| ?               | Matches exactly one character.                          |
| *               | Matches zero or more characters.                        |
| **              | Matches zero or more 'directories' in a path            |
| {spring:[a-z]+} | Matches regExp [a-z]+ as a path variable named "spring" |
+-----------------+---------------------------------------------------------+

Some examples:

+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------+
| Example                      | Matches:                                               |
+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------+
| com/t?st.jsp                 | com/test.jsp but also com/tast.jsp or com/txst.jsp     |
| com/*.jsp                    | All .jsp files in the com directory                    |
| com/**/test.jsp              | All test.jsp files underneath the com path             |
| org/springframework/**/*.jsp | All .jsp files underneath the org/springframework path |
| org/**/servlet/bla.jsp       | org/springframework/servlet/bla.jsp                    |
|                       also:  | org/springframework/testing/servlet/bla.jsp            |
|                       also:  | org/servlet/bla.jsp                                    |
| com/{filename:\\w+}.jsp      | com/test.jsp & assign value test to filename variable  |
+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------+

Answer 4

ANT Style Pattern Matcher

Wildcards

The utility uses three different wildcards.

+----------+-----------------------------------+
| Wildcard |            Description            |
+----------+-----------------------------------+
| *        | Matches zero or more characters.  |
| ?        | Matches exactly one character.    |
| **       | Matches zero or more directories. |
+----------+-----------------------------------+

Answer 5

Ant-style path patterns matching in spring-framework:

The mapping matches URLs using the following rules:

• ? matches one character
• * matches zero or more characters
• ** matches zero or more 'directories' in a path
• {spring:[a-z]+} matches the regexp [a-z]+ as a path variable named "spring"

Some examples:

• com/t?st.jsp - matches com/test.jsp but also com/tast.jsp or com/txst.jsp
• com/*.jsp - matches all .jsp files in the com directory
• com/**/test.jsp - matches all test.jsp files underneath the com path
• org/springframework/**/*.jsp - matches all .jsp files underneath the org/springframework path
• org/**/servlet/bla.jsp - matches org/springframework/servlet/bla.jsp but also org/springframework/testing/servlet/bla.jsp and org/servlet/bla.jsp
• com/{filename:\\w+}.jsp will match com/test.jsp and assign the value test to the filename variable

http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/javadoc-api/org/springframework/util/AntPathMatcher.html