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.
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.