[asterisk-dev] zero-or-more match

[Nick Lewis]

> Well, the "easy" way would be if there was a special character which
> repeated the previous pattern zero or more times. Like * in common
> regular expressions.

I do not see this as a substitute for real dialplan security but it
would be a useful new feature. 

To repeat a "previous pattern" may be too complicated and confusing but
to repeat a "previous character" would be useful. The % character is
little used in extensions so could potentially be reassigned as dialplan
punctuation for the purpose of repeating the previous character. e.g.

"3%" matches "", "3", "33" etc
"[a-z]%" matches "", "b", "yx" etc
"X%" matches "", "0", "98" etc
"3\%" matches "3%"

Another useful feature would be a non-repeating "." that wildcard
matches just one character. The ? character may be suitable for this
where "?%" is equivalent to "!" and "??%" is equivalent to "." . I
currently use "[!-~]" extensively for this purpose but it does not deal
with whitespace and unprintable ascii.

-- N_L

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