User's Manual

Searching for Records
Wildcard Searching
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Wildcard Searching
A wildcard search employs symbols that essentially act as placeholders for criteria
when you either don’t know or don’t care about some element of your search
criteria. Wildcard searches may be applied within any Quick Search screen for any
Text field, so long as the Approx operator is used. For example, let’s say you are
interested in finding all Tag ID records whose Serial Number field contains one
of the following sequences of characters “54-A2”, “54-B2”, “54-C2”, “54-D2” or
“54-E2”. To find these records without a wildcard search mechanism would be
rather tedious. However, by employing the ? symbol, you could easily find all
matching records by specifying the search criteria of “54-?2” (excluding the quotes
and where the ? represents any single character value), selecting the Approx
operator, then selecting the Search button. Note that such a search would also
find records whose Serial Number field contained “54-F2”, “54-G2” etc., as well
as “54-32”, “54-92”, “54-#2” and so on.
An * symbol may be used to designate any number of any characters. In our case,
the criteria of “54-*2” would return all records whose Serial Number field
contained data such as “54-A2”, “54-AAAA2”, “54-2”, “54-Z23G2”, etc. If
needed, we could combine an * and a ? symbol to further enhance our search
criteria. For example, search criteria of “*54-?2*” (again, our use of quotes here is
for readability only) would return all records containing the characters “54-” and
“2” with only one intervening character. The beginning and ending * symbols
allow for any number of any characters to precede or follow the inner sequence.
Another example combining the * and ? symbols is “*a??”, which would return all
records whose designated Text field contains data that has the letter “a” as the third
from the last character, regardless of the characters preceding the letter “a”.
Another special symbol that you may use is the | (pipe or vertical bar) symbol.
This symbol is interpreted as an “either or” statement. Thus, we could specify
“54|?2”, which would be return all records starting with “54” and also all records
ending with “2” with any one preceding character.
Note
For the Approx operator, you may use the *, ?, and | symbols as
traditional (literal) criteria by preceding them with a \ character. See
the “Search Operators & Field Types” section for more information.