wild card

12. wild card

 Wildcards are special characters used to represent none or more characters in a string, while searching for information in any type of computer database. The most commonly used characters are '*', which represents any number of characters in a string of characters, and '?', which represents a single character in the search string. 

For example, when searching through the following files: 123.XYZ, 223.XYZ, 1123.XYZ, 1223.XYZ and 123.XZY The search string '*1*.X*' will list all the files.

The string '*.XYZ' will omit the 123.XYZ file The string '?23.XYZ' will omit 1123.XYZ and 1223.XYZ Finally, the string '??23.X??' will only show the files, '1123.XYZ' and '1223.XYZ'