micromatch-minimatch-comparison.md

micromatch vs. minimatch (WIP)

Can micromatch be used as a drop-in replacement for minimatch?

For mainstream features, I tried to keep as much parity as possible between micromatch and minimatch. But there are some differences.

Key differences

• the main minimatch function, minimatch(), works like micromatch.isMatch()
• the main micromatch function, micromatch(), works like multimatch, with support for multiple patterns.
• micromatch optimizes patterns to generate the leanest possible regex to use for matching without sacrificing accuracy.

Optimized regular expressions

Micromatch's optimizations are achieved in a number of different ways.

Brace expansion

It's not uncommon to do this in a gulp or Grunt task:

src('*.{yml,json}');

Features

feature	micromatch	minimatch	notes
multiple patterns	yes	no	ex: ['*.js', '!foo']
# comments in file paths	no	yes
brace expansion	yes	yes	ex: *.{txt,md}
regex character classes	yes	sort of	ex: [a-c]*.js, match file names starting with a through c
extglobs	yes	yes	ex: `+(foo
POSIX bracket expressions	yes	no	(character classes) ex: [[:alpha:][:lower:]]
regex or string	yes	no	Micromatch will take a regex or a glob pattern to use for matching.

multiple pattern support

Support for matching against multiple patterns, like ['*.js', '!foo']:

• Minimatch: no
• Micromatch: yes

Because of this, there is also a key difference in how the main exported function from each library is used.

Key difference

• micromatch(): the main micromatch() function works like multimatch, and supports matching with multiple patterns (e.g. ['*.js', '!foo']).
• minimatch(): the main minimatch() function works like micromatch.isMatch(), returning true if a single path matches the given pattern.

API

Methods

method	micromatch	minimatch	notes
matchOne	no	yes	like match, but only the first file
makeRe	yes	yes	create a regular expression from the pattern.
match	yes	yes	return an array of matches from a single pattern
filter	yes	yes	like match but returns a function that can be passed to Array.filter
contains	yes	no	like match, but matches any part of a path, not just the entire path
expand	yes	no	returns an object of tokens, which are passed to .makeRe()
matcher	yes	no	returns a function to use for matching
isMatch	yes	no	returns true if a path matches the given pattern. Works like minimatch()
matchKeys	yes	no	match the keys in an object

Options

option	micromatch	minimatch	description
flipNegate	no	yes
failglob	yes	no	throw when no matches are found (bash parity)
ignore	yes	no	string or array of patterns to ignore. like negate, but passed on options.
nocase	yes	yes	...
nonull	yes	yes	...
nullglob	yes	yes	...
nonegate	yes	yes	...

Other differences

benchmarks

micromatch is faster in every benchmark by a significant margin. One significant case that stands out is matching on arrays with thousands of items (like filepaths in a project). Here are the results from the benchmarks for matching against an array of ~7-8k items:

micromatch.js x 773 ops/sec ±0.62% (98 runs sampled)
minimatch.js x 27.52 ops/sec ±0.66% (49 runs sampled)

Bash 4.3

micromatch has better Bash 4.3 coverage along with extensive, organized unit tests

micromatch isn't a constructor

However, if you're using new Minimatch() because you need to do some kind of customization to the pre-regex pattern or whatever, then you should be able to achieve the same or similar results with micromatch.

In particular, micromatch.expand() parses the glob pattern and returns an object. You can then pass that to the .makeRe() method to generate the regex for matching.

Notes

(nothing yet)