Appendix D   Wildcard Patterns


This appendix describes the format of wildcard patterns used by the iPlanet Web Server.

These wildcards are used in:

• directives in the configuration file obj.conf (see Chapter 2 "Syntax and Use of obj.conf")

• various built-in SAFs (see Chapter 3 "Predefined SAFs and the Request Handling Process")

• some NSAPI functions (see Chapter 5 "NSAPI Function Reference")

Wildcard patterns use special characters. If you want to use one of these characters without the special meaning, precede it with a backslash (\) character.

Wildcard Patterns

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Table D-1    Wildcard patterns

Pattern	Use
*	Match zero or more characters.
?	Match exactly one occurrence of any character.
|	An or expression. The substrings used with this operator can contain other special characters such as * or $. The substrings must be enclosed in parentheses, for example, (a|b|c), but the parentheses cannot be nested.
$	Match the end of the string. This is useful in or expressions.
[abc]	Match one occurrence of the characters a, b, or c. Within these expressions, the only character that needs to be treated as a special character is ]; all others are not special.
[a-z]	Match one occurrence of a character between a and z.
[^az]	Match any character except a or z.
*~	This expression, followed by another expression, removes any pattern matching the second expression.

Wildcard Examples

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Table D-2    Wildcard examples

Pattern	Result
*.netscape.com	Matches any string ending with the characters .netscape.com.
(quark|energy).netscape.com	Matches either quark.netscape.com or energy.netscape.com.
198.93.9[23].???	Matches a numeric string starting with either 198.93.92 or 198.93.93 and ending with any 3 characters.
*.*	Matches any string with a period in it.
*~netscape-*	Matches any string except those starting with netscape-.
*.netscape.com~quark.netscape.com	Matches any host from domain netscape.com except for a single host quark.netscape.com.
*.netscape.com~(quark|energy |neutrino).netscape.com	Matches any host from domain .netscape.com except for hosts quark.netscape.com, energy.netscape.com, and neutrino.netscape.com.
*.com~*.netscape.com	Matches any host from domain .com except for hosts from subdomain netscape.com.
type=*~magnus-internal/*	Matches any type that does not start with magnus-internal/. This wildcard pattern is used in the file obj.conf in the catch-all Service directive.