using regular expressions in select statements

[dendenners]

Hi there.
I would like to check some file names that I receive against values in a database. I have a database table that holds valid file names, and I need to check specific file names against values in this table. However my problem is that some of the files I receive have a timestamp as part of their name. For example, I may receive a file with the name 'foo20020605120000.dat', where the numbers are a timestamp. What I would like to have is a value in the database like 'foo*.dat' which would positively match the above file. I know this is possible the other way around using the 'LIKE' keyword, but I have never seen an example the way I want it. Thanks for your help.
P.S. if I was able to have a value in the table of
'fooYYYYMMDDhhmmss.dat' that would match the above file, it would be even better.

 

[spenglerr]

where filename like 'foo%dat'

 

[dendenners]

Thanks for the post. However I don't think I explained myself terribly well in the last post. You see I want to restrict the number of allowable file names to a certain pattern matching the reg exp you mentioned above, (foo%dat),
along with various other miscellaneous patterns that are allowable (I should be able to add new allowable values simply by adding a row to a table).
So in my sql statement the actual file name has to be passed in exactly as it first appears (foo20020605120000.dat in the above case) I would then like to check this against the reg exps in the table with something like 'select * from VALID_FILES where FILE_PATTERN LIKE foo20020605120000.dat' where FILE_PATTERN would contain foo%.dat. Alas oracle only reads a % from a row as a literal percent, and does not allow expansion.
I have a different solution arrived at by having 2 cols, a FILE_MAX and FILE_MIN. This way I would use 'select FILE_NAME where FILE_MAX > foo20020605120000.dat and FILE_MIN < foo20020605120000.dat'. maybe thats the best solution. Thanks anyway