Bug: Star is not treated as a literal character inside brackets

[uap-universe]

The reference implementation does not treat a '*' character as a literal character inside brackets.

Current behavior

pattern = "ab[e*]cd.i";
  
// matches:
"ab[e]cd.i"
"ab[[]cd.i"
"ab[^]cd.i"
"ab[/]cd.i"
"ab[[]cd.i"
"ab[e[^/e[e]cd.i"

// does not match:
"abecd.i"
"ab*cd.i"

Expected behavior

the opposite

[cxw42]

Thanks for reporting! Would you please post instructions for reproducing the issue? Please make sure to include the specific commit at which you are testing. Much appreciated!

[uap-universe]

I am testing against master branch by invoking ec_glob(pattern, string) with the pattern and the test strings from above.

[xuhdev]

I think this is a bug, as there's really no meaning * in brackets. We really tried to mimic gitignore patterns in the beginning, and my experiment shows that gitignore would see * as a literal inside brackets. Also checked out PCRE, same behavior.

I think this is also what the spec means, but we didn't write it clearly out.

[uap-universe]

Yes, I agree. There is another thing the spec does not clearly write out: slashes have precedence over anything else.

Meaning that a slash will "destroy" the bracket pattern.

Example: [ab/cd] will not be translated as "one of a, b, /, c, or d" but instead it will be the literal sequence [ab/cd].

See also issue 499 in the main repo.

and you might also be interested in how I solved this.

However, since this looks very intentional, I think it's desired behavior - just not documented. So when fixing this bug, you might need to be careful not to change this behavior.