Synopsis edit
-
- string match ?-nocase? pattern string
Description edit
Determine whether
pattern matches
string, returning return 1 if it does, 0 if it doesn't. If
-nocase is specified, then the pattern attempts to match against the string in a case insensitive manner.
string equal compares strings literally, but
string match matches interprets a pattern expression and matches a string against that.
For the two strings to match, their contents must be identical except that the following special sequences may appear in
pattern:
- *
- Matches any sequence of characters in string, including a null string.
- ?
- Matches any single character in string.
- [chars]
- Matches any character in the set given by chars. If a sequence of the form x-y appears in chars, then any character between x and y, inclusive, will match. When used with -nocase, the end points of the range are converted to lower case first. Whereas {[A-z]} matches '_' when matching case-sensitively ('_' falls between the 'Z' and 'a'), with -nocase this is considered like {[A-Za-z]} (and probably what was meant in the first place).
- \x Matches the single character x. This provides a way of avoiding the special interpretation of the characters *?[]\ in pattern.
Beware that the parsing of strings inside grouping
[] is not particularly robust -- neither the manual, the tests nor the code takes pains to specify how to interpret combinations of
\[]*?- inside brackets. If you need a character class which includes any of these special characters, you are probably better off with a
regexp. (see also [
1
]).
string match does not use the same code as
globstring match *test* "this is only a test" ;# -> true
Layers of Quoting edit
to match a single left bracket, the match pattern should be a backslash followed by a left bracket so that
string match sees the left bracket as a literal character. One possibility is to place the backslash and left bracket in curly quotes so that Tcl leaves them alone:
string match {\[} {[}Alternatively, the backslash could be preceded by a backslash and the left bracket could be preceded by a backslash:
string match \\\[ \[
See Also edit
