Wildcard

A wild card is a symbol that means "Anything can match".

It is used in database search queries. For example if you wanted to find all of the men in your database that had a surname starting with Sm, you could use the search term:

Sm*

When you run the search, the database would return all records which started Sm... such as Smith, Smythe, Smallwood, Smethwick.

If you don't remember the name of a document that you saved, you could use the wildcard to run a search such as *.doc

This would give you a list of every doc file, regardless of its name.

A wild card is part of a family of search symbols called 'Regular Expressions'.

 

2020-10