See also the interface to the PCRE library:

library(pcre)

The query:

?- wildcard_match('a*a*a*a*a*a*a*a*a*a*a*a*a*a','aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaab').

Hangs SWI-Prolog for a very very very long time.

Wildcard matching with unlimited recursion is dangerous, see: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5163931/Fast-String-Matching-with-Wildcards-Globs-and-Giti

-- Robert

See also: re_match/2, a Perl compatible regular expression matching predicate

Note that

• The pattern is compiled first. The size of the compiled object is limited to 1024 characters
• Only characters in the range 1..255 can use used in both the pattern and target, i.e., this predicate does not support full Unicode characters.