Pattern Matching docs do not make sense?

[shoce]

Looking at the Pattern Matching docs https://github.com/minio/docs/blob/main/source/reference/minio-mc.rst#pattern-matching i barely can see the point.

Let's take the first example:

Pattern | Text | Match Result
abc*    | ab   | Match

it does not make sense to me, as the pattern starts with abc and the text is even shorter.

Another example from the docs:

Pattern | Text | Match Result
abc*c   | abcd | Match

also confuses me a lot - the pattern ends with c and the text does not.

[ravindk89]

6cae178

hm - @djwfyi do you recall at all where the pattern matching stuff came from? Inclined to agree it looks wrong, but this looks like a table we would have pulled from elsewhere.

Either way seems fine to go through and clean it up, these should be similar to glob matching rules.

[djwfyi]

See https://github.com/minio/pkg/blob/1a72a87db0b49a06a3171c960bc8287b0baa2e04/wildcard/match.go#L72

[ravindk89]

@donatello this looks a few years old - if most of our pattern matching boils down to blob-style we can say that and ditch the table. Or if you can recall how this came about that might help.

[ravindk89]

@vadmeste @donatello ping on the above - do we have more specific guidance on how pattern matching should work for mc commands?

[djwfyi]

Per the code comment, the matching is a prefix matching, not a really a pattern matching.
In the context of prefix matching the table makes more sense.

[OrkhanAlikhanov]

@djwfyi, not only that it, from the code:
https://github.com/minio/pkg/blob/c57313ca813e24ac767d8783aef21f17b4270863/wildcard/match.go#L72-L99

It seems to just return true when reaching * without considering anything after it. How is that even useful?

[shoce]

It seems to just return true when reaching * without considering anything after it. How is that even useful?

thank you for pointing this, i think this is the root of my confusion, now i understand why this pattern matches:

//	| Pattern | Text    | Match Result |
//	====================================
//	| abc*c   | abcd    | True         |

i never saw a pattern matching like this, the last c in the pattern is just not considered, and the docs are not clear about it.