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Home > Site Help > Advanced Search > Using Wildcards
Using Wildcards
You can use wildcards in your search
query to refine your search beyond the range of stemmed
variants, which are found by default in a simple search. Wildcards enable
you to find documents that contain words that have similar spellings but
differ in root meaning. For example, while plan stems into plans
and planning , stemming will not extend plan to find plane
or planet. However, with wildcards you can find all of these words.
Some characters, such as * and ?, automatically indicate a wildcard-based
search and do not require you to use the <WILDCARD> operator
as part of the expression.
Wildcard operators
| Character |
Description |
| * |
Specifies 0 or more alphanumeric characters. For example, air*
finds documents that contain air, airline, and airhead.
Cannot be used as the first character in an expression.
Is ignored in a set of ([ ]) or in an alternative pattern ({ }).
Does not require the <WILDCARD> operator.
|
| ? |
Specifies a single alphanumeric character, although you can use
more than one ? to indicate multiple characters. For example, ?at
finds documents that contain cat and hat, while ??at
finds documents that contain that and chat.
Is ignored in a set of ([ ]) or in an alternative pattern ({ }).
Does not require, the <WILDCARD> operator.
|
| {} |
An alternative pattern that specifies a series of patterns, one
for each pattern separated by commas. For example,
<WILDCARD> `Chat{s, ting, ty}`
finds documents that contain chats, chatting, and chatty.
You must enclose the entire string in back quotes and you cannot
have any embedded spaces.
|
| [ ] |
A set that specifies a series of characters that can be used
to find a match. For example,
<WILDCARD> `[chp]at`
finds documents that contain cat, hat, and pat.
You must enclose the entire string in back quotes and you cannot
have any embedded spaces.
|
| ^ |
Specifies one or more characters to exclude from a set. For example,
<WILDCARD> `C[^io]t` finds documents that contain cat
and cut, but not cot.
The caret (^) must be the first character after the left bracket.
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| - |
Specifies a range of characters in a set. For example, <WILDCARD>
`Ch[a-j]t` finds documents that contain any four-letter word
from chat to chjt. |
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