Wildcard To Regex in Java

This code works like wild card expression in java. there is no in-built methods to identify which are using wild card chars '?', and '*'.
Every programmer know about these('?','*') chars how there are working.
Here the code snippet to work like their behavior

public static String wildcardToRegex(String wildcard){
StringBuffer s = new StringBuffer(wildcard.length());
s.append('^');
for (int i = 0, is = wildcard.length(); i < is; i++) {
char c = wildcard.charAt(i);
switch(c) {
case '*':
s.append(".*");
break;
case '?':
s.append(".");
break;
// escape special regexp-characters
case '(': case ')': case '[': case ']': case '$':
case '^': case '.': case '{': case '}': case '|':
case '\\':
s.append("\\");
s.append(c);
break;
default:
s.append(c);
break;
}
}
s.append('$');
return(s.toString());
}