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A wildcard character can be used to substitute for any other character or characters in the search string. Wildcards act as placeholders for missing characters. For example, an asterisk (*) matches any number of characters, including none, and the question mark (?) matches any single character. The term wildcard or 'wild card' was originally used in card games to describe a card that can be assigned any value that its holder desires. Wildcards that EasyFind understands: * : Matches none, one, or multiple characters [a-b] : Matches a range of characters [a|b|c|…] or [abc…] : Matches a choice of characters [^…] : Excludes characters ? : Matches exactly one character
Example: Demo* : Everything starting with 'Demo' (Prefix) *ing : Everything ending with 'ing' (Suffix) NS*.h : Everything starting with 'NS' and ending with '.h' (e.g. all Cocoa header files) ?ouse : All words with five characters and ending with 'ouse' (e.g. 'mouse' or 'house') [a-ez]* : Everything starting with 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', or 'z' [d-fk-j]*[gh] : Everything starting with 'd', 'e', 'f', 'k', 'i', or 'j', and ending with 'g' or 'h' [^be]* : Everything not starting with 'b' or 'e'
Search for file/folder names: When searching for file/folder names wildcards are applied to the whole search term:
Example: default*folder: Find all files with their name starting with "default" and ending in "folder". *default*folder*: Finds all files with the name containing "default" and "folder" in this order. The name does not need to start or end with these terms.
Special handling of words containing hyphens and dots: Hyphens: E.g. 'e-mail' is treated like '(email OR "e mail")' and therefore matches e.g. 'email', 'e-mail' or 'e mail'. Dots: Characters separated by dots are considered to be abbreviations and therefore handled like words separated by hyphens, e.g. the term 'a.b.c' is equal to '("a b c" OR abc)' and matches 'a b c', 'a.b.c', 'abc', 'a-b-c', etc.