Today I learned you can perform shell-like globbing and matching of any string in Ruby with File.fnmatch (not just filenames).

File.fnmatch("foo*", "food") #=> true
File.fnmatch("foo*", "bar")  #=> false

This seems a little more “secure” for user-specified patterns and is more performant than even simple regular expressions, not counting what weird things your (malicious) users may be able to do with expensive backtracking and whatnot.

require 'benchmark'

n = 500000
Benchmark.bm do |x|
  x.report("fnmatch") { n.times { File.fnmatch("foo*", "food")      } }
  x.report("regexp")  { n.times { "food".match(Regexp.new("foo.+")) } }
end

       user     system      total        real
fnmatch  0.250000   0.000000   0.250000 (  0.250139)
regexp  3.510000   0.060000   3.570000 (  3.574322)

Source: How do I test whether a string would match a glob in Ruby?