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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 single 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. |
| - |
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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