[Asterisk-Users] wildcard matching in dialplan

[Phil Blundell]

On Sun, 2006-01-22 at 18:18 +0100, Wilson Pickett wrote:
> You could also use a trick like *21* going to a new context and
> waiting for digits (with a slighly longer timeout) and have it
> "trigger" on the longest possible number.
> 
> perhaps if local extension were of the form 2nnn or 2nn and you want
> to use both local and normal local POTS numbers you can use two or
> more extensions:
> 
> _*21*2xx*
> _*21*2xxx*
> 
> _*21*nxxnxxxx*
> 
> etc. Use the include=> "trick" to prioritize the last three properly.

Thanks for the suggestions.  

Unfortunately your second option wouldn't have worked for me because my
users want to forward calls to all manner of external numbers, including
international ones with unpredictable formats.  I thought about doing
the first thing you mentioned, but I wasn't sure whether this would work
if someone programmed a redirect into a speed-dial key and Asterisk got
hit with the whole number at once.

Anyway, I ended up hacking the pattern matching code in pbx.c to support
the kind of patterns that I needed.  It's a bit gruesome, but seems to
be working well enough.

p.