Wildcard characters

Search for	Example	Results
A single word	`cat`	Topics that contain the word "cat". You will also find its grammatical variations, such as "cats".
A phrase. You can specify that the search results contain a specific phrase.	`"cat food"` (quotation marks)	Topics that contain the literal phrase "cat food" and all its grammatical variations. Without the quotation marks, the query is equivalent to specifying an OR operator, which finds topics with one of the individual words instead of the phrase.

Search for	Operator	Example
Two or more words in the same topic	`AND` `and` `+` (plus symbol) `&` (ampersand)	`cat AND dog` `"cat food"+milk` `"cat food"&"dog food"`
Either word in a topic	`OR` `or` `\|` (pipe)	`cat OR dog` `cat \| dog`
Topics that do not contain a specific word or phrase	`NOT` `not` `!` (exclamation point)	`NOT cat` `! dog`
Topics that contain one string and do not contain another	`^` (caret)	`cat ^ mouse`
A combination of search types	`( )` parentheses	`cat + (dog \| mouse)` `cat \| dog + (! mouse)`

By default, Service Manager uses the question mark (?) as the wildcard that represents a single character, the asterisk (*) to represent multiple characters, and the backslash (\) as the escape character. Therefore, for a literal search on the * or ? character, you must immediately precede that character with a backslash (\), such as \?.

Note: You can modify the wildcard characters and the escape character by using the wildcardcharacters parameter in the Service Manager server sm.ini file.

Example Scenario:

Suppose you want to find all records containing last names where the second character is'e'.

To search for any character followed by the letter e followed by the asterisk (*) character, you would type ?e\* in the Last Name field to generate alike query. Although the question mark (?) is a wildcard character, it verifies that the last name ends with a literal *.

The query would retrieve and display records with last names that begin with:

Ae* ae* ?e* *e* ...

Related topics