I’m not the first developer to code a method dedicated to matching the classic ‘*’ and ‘?’ wildcards in Rust. But I may be the first to code an all-logic algorithm for that purpose – in this case, an algorithm informed by performance and testcase suggestions from many folks in the C/C++ developer community,
All that was needed, algorithmically speaking, was a logic tweak to fit Rust-style text content. The result: a pair of functions, one for matching wildcards in ASCII text (fast!), and another, based on the same algorithm, that’s UTF-8-ready. The code is available on GitHub.
Though the original C/C++ code works only for ASCII text strings, Rust has made a UTF-8-enabled implementation as simple as using a built-in data type. New UTF-8 testcases are provided with the Rust code. A description of the algorithm’s history, the process of converting it to Rust, some philosophy legitimizing the conditional logic approach, and the development of the UTF-8 testcases, all appear at developforperfromance.com.