Editing Glob (programming) (section)

==Compared to regular expressions==
Globs do not include syntax for the [[Kleene star]] which allows multiple repetitions of the preceding part of the expression; thus they are not considered [[regular expression]]s, which can describe the full set of [[regular language]]s over any given finite alphabet.<ref>{{cite book | last1 = Hopcroft | first1 = John E. | last2 = Motwani | first2 = Rajeev | last3 = Ullman | first3 = Jeffrey D. | title = Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation | publisher = Addison-Wesley | year = 2000 | edition = 2nd}}</ref>

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Common wildcard
! Equivalent regular expression

|-
| {{code|?}}
| {{code|.}}

|-
| {{code|*}}
| {{code|.*}}
|}

Globs attempt to match the entire string (for example, {{code|S*.DOC}} matches S.DOC and SA.DOC, but not POST.DOC or SURREY.DOCKS), whereas, depending on implementation details, regular expressions may match a substring.

=== Implementing as regular expressions ===

The original Mozilla [[proxy auto-config]] implementation, which provides a glob-matching function on strings, uses a replace-as-RegExp implementation as above. The bracket syntax happens to be covered by regex in such an example.

Python's fnmatch uses a more elaborate procedure to transform the pattern into a regular expression.<ref name=py>{{cite web |title=Lib/fnmatch.py |url=https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.8/Lib/fnmatch.py |publisher=Python |access-date=10 November 2021 |date=20 January 2021 |archive-date=2021-11-10  |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211110204645/https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.8/Lib/fnmatch.py |url-status=live }}</ref>