Wildcard Characters

Supported Wildcard Characters in Search

'?' or '_'

Question Mark or Underscore - Searches for any single character or digit.

For example, searching for '1?' would return matches that include 10, 12, 17, and 19. Searching for '1???' would return matches that include 1000, 1111, 1001, 1586, 1073, etc

'*' or '%'

Asterisk or Percent - Searches for zero to any number of characters. Often the asterisk is used in place of part of a phrase or word.

For example, searching for 'ap*' would return matches that include AP, AP-Link, ape, APEC, apple, apples, etc.

[charlist]

Searches for any single character/digit within the brackets.

For example, searching for 1[0234] would return matches that contained 10, 12, 13, and 14 as the first two digits.

[!charlist] or [^charlist]

Searches for any matches that do not include characters/digits within the brackets.

For example, searching for 1[^0234] would return matches that contained 11, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19 as the first two digits.

A group of one or more characters (charlist) enclosed in brackets ([ ]) can be used to match any single character in the string and can include almost any character code, including digits.

Other important rules for pattern matching include the following:

  1. By using a hyphen (-) to separate the upper and lower bounds of the range, charlist can specify a range of characters. For example, [A-Z] results in a match if the corresponding character position in the string contains any uppercase letters in the range A-Z. Multiple ranges are included within the brackets without delimiters.
  2. An exclamation point (!) at the beginning of charlist means that a match is made if any character except the characters in charlist is found. When used outside brackets, the exclamation point matches itself.
  3. A hyphen (-) can appear either at the beginning (after an exclamation point if one is used) or at the end of charlist to match itself. If any other location, they hyphen is used to identify a range of characters.
  4. When a range of characters is specified, they must appear in ascending sort order (from lowest to highest). [A-Z] is a valid pattern, but [Z-A] is not.
  5. The character sequence [] is considered a zero-length string ("").