Globby

Globby is a small ~1k LoC library designed for searching all items in a given directory that match a glob pattern.

Examples

use globby::glob;

let pattern = glob("**/*.*").unwrap();

for path in pattern {
  println!("{}", path.unwrap().display());
}

This library should work on any platform.

Comparing to glob

The well-known glob library is more polished and has a lot more options, but also opinionated defaults that differ from this library, such as:

• The base directory is not yielded in the results
• Symbolic links are always followed
• Directories are always yielded before their descendents
• Alternate groups (matching either one sub-pattern or another) is supported
• ** matches anything, including files an hidden directories

Syntax

The syntax for patterns is as followed:

• Normal characters behave as expected
• ? matches any character
• * matches any suite of characters, or no character at all
• [abc] matches any of a, b or c
• [!abc] matches any character except a, b and c
• [\[] matches [. The list of escapable characters is [, ], {, }, *, ?, \, /, | and :
  • [abc\[] matches any of a, b, c or [
• [[:alpha:]] will match any alphabetic character. The list of character classes are:
  • :alpha: for any alphabetic character
  • :digit: for any digit
  • :alphanumeric: for any alphabetic character or digit
  • :uppercase: for any uppercase character
  • :lowercase: for any lowercase character
  • :whitespace: for any whitespace character
• [![:alpha:]] will match any non-alphabetic character
• {a|bc} will match any of a or bc
  • This can be combined with other matchers, e.g. {[[:alpha:]][![:digit]]|[[:digit:]]*} will match any alphabetic character followed by a non-digit character, OR a digit followed by anything

Matches are performed against path components, e.g. in /path/to/item components are path, to and item. Matchers cannot match path separators.

• Path separators can be written as / or \ depending on the platform (Windows, Linux, macOS, ...)
• In addition, ** will match any possible combination of directories. For instance, /**/*.txt will match any of /file.txt, /dir/file.txt, /dir/dir2/file.txt, and so on.
• Absolute patterns can only be matched against absolute paths. e.g. /dir will not match dir. Note that using a [crate::Walker] will not cause this problem as a base directory is used.

License

This project is provided under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license.