translate-pathname

(translate-pathname source from-wildcard to-wildcard &key)

Matches source against from-wildcard, then substitutes the pieces its wildcards captured into the wildcards of to-wildcard. The wildcards are the ones the rest of the pathname family understands: * (any run of characters), ? (one character) and **/ (zero or more whole directory levels). A source that does not match from-wildcard signals, as it does in Common Lisp.

A **/ is ONE wildcard, separator included: it captures the whole run of directory levels it consumed, and a **/ in to-wildcard writes that run back verbatim. Because it matches zero levels as well as many, a source with no intervening directory still translates:

Lite: the match and the substitution are component-wise -- a plain * or ? never crosses a directory boundary, and a **/ captures a run of whole directory levels -- but three diagnostics a structured implementation makes are not reproduced: a wildcard in to-wildcard with no capture left substitutes the empty string instead of signalling that FROM has too few wildcards for TO, wildcards standing next to each other in one component consume one capture apiece, and an unpaired ** is not checked.

Backend support

All four backends -- one definition in rontolisp source over primitives every backend has.