Search > Wildcard Search

A wildcard is a character that may be used in a search to represent one or more other characters. Using wildcard characters can broaden your search, allowing you to search for words that have spelling variations or contain a specified pattern or characters. In ProSeek, you can use the question mark (?) or the asterisk (*) as wildcards.

The question mark wildcard represents any single alphanumeric character in the position the ? occupies. The asterisk wildcard represents any number of characters (ranging from zero to one to multiple characters) in the position the * occupies.

For example:

carol? matches carole and carols (six-character words starting with carol, ending with one additional character). This search does not match carol (? must match one character) nor carolling or carolled.

w?re matches any four-character word such as were, wire, or ware but does not match wired, wares nor where.

199? matches four-character records such as 1996,1997, 1998 and so on.

house* matches house, houses, housedress, houseguest, household, and so on.

NOTE:

1.Neither wildcard character may appear at the beginning of a word.

2.Wildcards may appear at the end of a search term except when the wildcard ends a two-character search term. You may successfully use the search term tra* but neither the term tr* nor tr? will yield results.

3.Search term must be at least two (2) characters in length, without wildcard characters.

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