extglob

Extended glob support for JavaScript. Adds (almost) the expressive power of regular expressions to glob patterns.

Please consider following this project's author, Jon Schlinkert, and consider starring the project to show your ❤️ and support.

Install

Install with npm:

$ npm install --save extglob

Convert an extglob string to a regex-compatible string.
More complete (and correct) support than minimatch (minimatch fails a large percentage of the extglob tests)
Handles negation patterns
Handles nested patterns
Organized code base, easy to maintain and make changes when edge cases arise
As you can see by the benchmarks, extglob doesn't pay with speed for it's completeness, accuracy and quality.

Heads up!: This library only supports extglobs, to handle full glob patterns and other extended globbing features use micromatch instead.

Usage

The main export is a function that takes a string and options, and returns an object with the parsed AST and the compiled .output, which is a regex-compatible string that can be used for matching.

var extglob = require('extglob');
console.log(extglob('!(xyz)*.js'));

Extglob cheatsheet

Extended globbing patterns can be defined as follows (as described by the bash man page):

pattern

regex equivalent

description

?(pattern-list)

`(...

...)?`

*(pattern-list)

`(...

...)*`

+(pattern-list)

`(...

...)+`

@(pattern-list)

`(...

...)` [1]

!(pattern-list)

N/A

Matches anything except one of the given pattern(s)

API

extglob

Convert the given extglob pattern into a regex-compatible string. Returns an object with the compiled result and the parsed AST.

Params

pattern {String}
options {Object}
returns {String}

Example

var extglob = require('extglob');
console.log(extglob('*.!(*a)'));
//=> '(?!\\.)[^/]*?\\.(?!(?!\\.)[^/]*?a\\b).*?'

.match

Takes an array of strings and an extglob pattern and returns a new array that contains only the strings that match the pattern.

Params

list {Array}: Array of strings to match
pattern {String}: Extglob pattern
options {Object}
returns {Array}: Returns an array of matches

Example

var extglob = require('extglob');
console.log(extglob.match(['a.a', 'a.b', 'a.c'], '*.!(*a)'));
//=> ['a.b', 'a.c']

.isMatch

Returns true if the specified string matches the given extglob pattern.

Params

string {String}: String to match
pattern {String}: Extglob pattern
options {String}
returns {Boolean}

Example

var extglob = require('extglob');

console.log(extglob.isMatch('a.a', '*.!(*a)'));
//=> false
console.log(extglob.isMatch('a.b', '*.!(*a)'));
//=> true

.contains

Returns true if the given string contains the given pattern. Similar to .isMatch but the pattern can match any part of the string.

Params

str {String}: The string to match.
pattern {String}: Glob pattern to use for matching.
options {Object}
returns {Boolean}: Returns true if the patter matches any part of str.

Example

var extglob = require('extglob');
console.log(extglob.contains('aa/bb/cc', '*b'));
//=> true
console.log(extglob.contains('aa/bb/cc', '*d'));
//=> false

.matcher

Takes an extglob pattern and returns a matcher function. The returned function takes the string to match as its only argument.

Params

pattern {String}: Extglob pattern
options {String}
returns {Boolean}

Example

var extglob = require('extglob');
var isMatch = extglob.matcher('*.!(*a)');

console.log(isMatch('a.a'));
//=> false
console.log(isMatch('a.b'));
//=> true

.create

Convert the given extglob pattern into a regex-compatible string. Returns an object with the compiled result and the parsed AST.

Params

str {String}
options {Object}
returns {String}

Example

var extglob = require('extglob');
console.log(extglob.create('*.!(*a)').output);
//=> '(?!\\.)[^/]*?\\.(?!(?!\\.)[^/]*?a\\b).*?'

.capture

Returns an array of matches captured by pattern in string, or null if the pattern did not match.

Params

pattern {String}: Glob pattern to use for matching.
string {String}: String to match
options {Object}: See available options for changing how matches are performed
returns {Boolean}: Returns an array of captures if the string matches the glob pattern, otherwise null.

Example

var extglob = require('extglob');
extglob.capture(pattern, string[, options]);

console.log(extglob.capture('test/*.js', 'test/foo.js'));
//=> ['foo']
console.log(extglob.capture('test/*.js', 'foo/bar.css'));
//=> null

.makeRe

Create a regular expression from the given pattern and options.

Params

pattern {String}: The pattern to convert to regex.
options {Object}
returns {RegExp}

Example

var extglob = require('extglob');
var re = extglob.makeRe('*.!(*a)');
console.log(re);
//=> /^[^\/]*?\.(?![^\/]*?a)[^\/]*?$/

Options

Available options are based on the options from Bash (and the option names used in bash).

options.nullglob

Type: boolean

Default: undefined

When enabled, the pattern itself will be returned when no matches are found.

options.nonull

Alias for options.nullglob, included for parity with minimatch.

options.cache

Type: boolean

Default: undefined

Functions are memoized based on the given glob patterns and options. Disable memoization by setting options.cache to false.

options.failglob

Type: boolean

Default: undefined

Throw an error is no matches are found.

Benchmarks

Last run on December 21, 2017

# negation-nested (49 bytes)
  extglob x 2,228,255 ops/sec ±0.98% (89 runs sampled)
  minimatch x 207,875 ops/sec ±0.61% (91 runs sampled)

  fastest is extglob (by 1072% avg)

# negation-simple (43 bytes)
  extglob x 2,205,668 ops/sec ±1.00% (91 runs sampled)
  minimatch x 311,923 ops/sec ±1.25% (91 runs sampled)

  fastest is extglob (by 707% avg)

# range-false (57 bytes)
  extglob x 2,263,877 ops/sec ±0.40% (94 runs sampled)
  minimatch x 271,372 ops/sec ±1.02% (91 runs sampled)

  fastest is extglob (by 834% avg)

# range-true (56 bytes)
  extglob x 2,161,891 ops/sec ±0.41% (92 runs sampled)
  minimatch x 268,265 ops/sec ±1.17% (91 runs sampled)

  fastest is extglob (by 806% avg)

# star-simple (46 bytes)
  extglob x 2,211,081 ops/sec ±0.49% (92 runs sampled)
  minimatch x 343,319 ops/sec ±0.59% (91 runs sampled)

  fastest is extglob (by 644% avg)

Differences from Bash

This library has complete parity with Bash 4.3 with only a couple of minor differences.

In some cases Bash returns true if the given string "contains" the pattern, whereas this library returns true if the string is an exact match for the pattern. You can relax this by setting options.contains to true.
This library is more accurate than Bash and thus does not fail some of the tests that Bash 4.3 still lists as failing in their unit tests

About

Contributing

Pull requests and stars are always welcome. For bugs and feature requests, please create an issue.

Running Tests

Running and reviewing unit tests is a great way to get familiarized with a library and its API. You can install dependencies and run tests with the following command:

$ npm install && npm test

Building docs

(This project's readme.md is generated by verb, please don't edit the readme directly. Any changes to the readme must be made in the .verb.md readme template.)

To generate the readme, run the following command:

$ npm install -g verbose/verb#dev verb-generate-readme && verb

You might also be interested in these projects:

braces: Bash-like brace expansion, implemented in JavaScript. Safer than other brace expansion libs, with complete support… more | homepage
expand-brackets: Expand POSIX bracket expressions (character classes) in glob patterns. | homepage
expand-range: Fast, bash-like range expansion. Expand a range of numbers or letters, uppercase or lowercase. Used… more | homepage
fill-range: Fill in a range of numbers or letters, optionally passing an increment or step to… more | homepage
micromatch: Glob matching for javascript/node.js. A drop-in replacement and faster alternative to minimatch and multimatch. | homepage