While the Visual Basic language has a nifty little Like operator, such a convenience is lacking in the other .NET languages. Most of us are familiar with the * and ? wildcards that we had access to in DOS, and like I said - it's easy to get with VB, but not so much with other languages.

Here's what I came up with to simulate it efficiently with the .NET FCL (this is generally the code in my command parser, for multi-ban, which is a helper function called if a wildcard is detected in the argument):

[code]
// top of file
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

// in the class
      #region helper function         banmulti
      private void banmulti(
         UserBase   commander,
         bool      whispered,
         string[]   args
         )
      {
         // In
         string pattern = args[0].Replace(
            "?", ".").Replace(
            "*", ".*");

         Regex re = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

         int len = myConnection.UsersInChannel.Length;

         for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
         {
            if (re.IsMatch(myConnection.UsersInChannel[i]))
            {
               // check flags
               // issue ban if flags don't prevent ban
            }
         }
      }
      #endregion
[/code]

myConnection is my connection manager instance, which maintains a list of the users currently in the channel (in an array property called UsersInChannel, suprisingly enough).

Hope that helps someone out. :)

How about using regular expressions to match users? That would be even more neat.


...nevermind.

[quote author=Maddox link=board=17;threadid=7724;start=0#msg70739 date=1089961833]
How about using regular expressions to match users? That would be even more neat.
[/quote]

I'm not quite sure what you mean.............. That _is_ what the regular expressions do.....

Weird, I didn't see that in your code the first time around. :-\

Depending on how many times you're going to be calling .IsMatch(), you might want to consider using the RegExOptions.Compiled flag.

[quote author=Maddox link=board=17;threadid=7724;start=0#msg70739 date=1089961833]
How about using regular expressions to match users?
[/quote]

If you mean like
[code]
.ban ^llama(.*?)\d{3}
[/code]

I found users to resent this type of matching for obvious reasons =\

[quote author=c0ol link=board=17;threadid=7724;start=0#msg71308 date=1090251336]
[code]
.ban ^llama(.*?)\d{3}
[/code]

I found users to resent this type of matching for obvious reasons =\
[/quote]

Well, they couldn't match that particular user without regular expressions. If you're only using the same features available with wildcards, regular expressions aren't that complicated.

[quote author=c0ol link=board=17;threadid=7724;start=0#msg71308 date=1090251336]
[quote author=Maddox link=board=17;threadid=7724;start=0#msg70739 date=1089961833]
How about using regular expressions to match users?
[/quote]

If you mean like
[code]
.ban ^llama(.*?)\d{3}
[/code]

I found users to resent this type of matching for obvious reasons =\
[/quote]

The point of my problem was, I'm not particularly familiar with Regular Expressions -- as to how they function in .NET. I knew that was probably the way I wanted to go just to get the old DOS ? and * wildcards, but I didn't know *how* to do that.

So, the input matching string is like this:

*[vL]

then my statement converts it into appropriate regular expression syntax:

.*[vL]

which matches correctly.

[quote author=Myndfyre link=board=17;threadid=7724;start=0#msg71357 date=1090268976]
So, the input matching string is like this:

*[vL]

then my statement converts it into appropriate regular expression syntax:

.*[vL]

which matches correctly.
[/quote]

Shouldn't that be .*\[vL]$ or possibly .*\[vL\]$ ?

[quote author=Adron link=board=17;threadid=7724;start=0#msg71377 date=1090275184]
[quote author=Myndfyre link=board=17;threadid=7724;start=0#msg71357 date=1090268976]
So, the input matching string is like this:

*[vL]

then my statement converts it into appropriate regular expression syntax:

.*[vL]

which matches correctly.
[/quote]

Shouldn't that be .*\[vL]$ or possibly .*\[vL\]$ ?
[/quote]

You may be correct; however, I've tested it out to work the way it is. Actually, yes, if I recall, [ and ] are control characters (I haven't done extensive testing). It might be a good idea for me to look for control characters and escape them out. Thanks for the heads-up. :)

this is what I did in perl once upon a time...
[code]
sub convertglob {
   my $thing = shift;
   $thing = quotemeta($thing);
   $thing = "^$thing\$";
   $thing =~ s/\\\*/\.\*/g;
   $thing =~ s/\\\?/\./g;
   my $re;
   {
      no re 'eval';
      $re = eval { qr/$thing/i };
   }
   return $re;
}
[/code]
take it for what it's worth (not much prolly)

[quote author=Myndfyre link=board=17;threadid=7724;start=0#msg71388 date=1090278115]
You may be correct; however, I've tested it out to work the way it is. Actually, yes, if I recall, [ and ] are control characters (I haven't done extensive testing). It might be a good idea for me to look for control characters and escape them out. Thanks for the heads-up. :)
[/quote]

Could you try matching *[vL] (using your wildcarder) against a name such as "[vL]Adron" and see if it matches that? I was thinking it might match any substring.