or better: String Matching with wildcards
I had to implement a pattern matching function and was so bored that I searched through the web for a good and fast implementation which was also able to use a wildcard. I've found a java implementation and converted it to c++, but it didn't support patterns longer than 32 values because the way the algorithm works (it uses the machine word size), but after reading through the original paper I've extended the source to work with longer patterns, too.
PatternMatching.cpp