Oracle iPlanet Web Proxy Server 4.0.14 NSAPI Developer's Guide

Chapter 6 Using Wildcard Patterns

This chapter describes the format of wildcard patterns used by Proxy Server. These wildcard are used in:

Directives in the configuration file obj.conf see Oracle iPlanet Web Proxy Server 4.0.14 Configuration File Reference for detailed information about obj.conf.
Various built-in SAFs see Oracle iPlanet Web Proxy Server 4.0.14 Configuration File Reference for more information about these predefined SAFs.
Some NSAPI functions.

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

This chapter contains the following sections:

Wildcard Patterns

The following table describes wildcard patterns, listing the pattern and its use.

Table 6–1 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 wildcard 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 other characters 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.
`*`	Match zero or more characters.

The following table provides wildcard examples, listing the pattern and the result.

Table 6–2 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 a single host `quark.netscape.com`.
`*.netscape.com~(quark\|energy\|neutrino).netscape.com`	Matches any host from domain .`netscape.com` except hosts `quark.netscape.com`, `energy.netscape.com`, and `neutrino.netscape.com`.
`.com~.netscape.com`	Matches any host from domain `.com` except 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.