2. Searching for channels

Request

The request URL used in order to search for channels takes one of the following two forms:

/archive/<archive key>/channels-by-pattern/<glob pattern expression>
  ↪[?prettyPrint]
/archive/<archive key>/channels-by-regexp/<regular expression>;[?prettyPrint] 

The archive key is the numeric key of the archive as specified in the list of archives (typically 1).

The search for a channel name can be done with a glob pattern or a regular expression. In either case, the pattern needs to be URL encoded so that all special characters (in particular those that have a special meaning in a URL, like the question mark) are encoded with %xx where xx is the hexadecimal character code. This includes the special wildcard characters that are part of the pattern. When the expression contains non-ASCII characters, those characters are expected to be specified in UTF-8 encoding.

When using a glob pattern, the channels-by-pattern URL has to be used. In the glob pattern expression, the ? and * characters have a special meaning. The question mark acts as wildcard that matches exactly one character. The asterisk acts as a wildcard that matches an arbitrary number of characters (including zero characters).

When using a regular expression, the channels-by-regexp URL has to be used. The regular expression must be specified in a form that is understood by the java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(java.lang.String) method.

If the optional prettyPrint parameter is present, the output is formatted nicely, which can be useful for debugging. Usually, this parameter should be omitted because this will result in a more compact representation, saving bandwidth.

Response

The response is a JSON array, containing JSON strings, where each string is a channel name. When no matching channel is found, an empty array is returned.

Example

Request:

GET /archive-access/api/1.0/archive/1/channels-by-pattern/my%2AExample?
  ↪prettyPrint HTTP/1.0

Response:

[ "myTest1Example", "myTest2Example" ]