Wildcard Matching

Wildcard matching decides whether an entire string is described by a pattern built from literal characters plus two wildcards: ? stands for exactly one character, and * stands for any run of characters, including none at all. This is the classic LeetCode 44 problem — the same style of matching a shell uses when you type *.txt. The catch is that * is greedy in theory but ambiguous in practice: a single * could stand for zero characters or twenty, and your matcher has to consider every split. The pattern must cover the whole string, not just a prefix.

Signature

wildcardMatch(s, pattern)   // string, pattern -> boolean

Return true only if pattern matches all of s from start to end.

Examples

wildcardMatch('adceb', '*a*b');   // true  — the two stars cover 'dce' and ''
wildcardMatch('acdcb', 'a*c?b');  // false — no split makes '?b' land on 'cb'
wildcardMatch('anything', '*');   // true  — a single star matches any string

Notes

• ? matches exactly one character — never zero, never two. 'a?c' matches 'abc' but not 'ac'.
• * matches any sequence, including empty — '*' matches '', 'a', and 'abcdef' alike. Several *s in a row behave like one.
• The match must be total — the pattern has to consume the entire string. 'a*' matches 'abc', but 'a' does not.
• Only these two wildcards — every other character, including letters and digits, matches only itself. There are no character classes or escapes.
• The empty pattern matches only the empty string — '' matches '' and nothing else, so a non-empty string needs a non-empty pattern.