Talk:Wildcard character

Still used?
Are wild cards still used? With modern text editors and 'explorers' and such this functionality seems to have gone. Why is this? I used to use them a lot. Or do I do something wrong? DirkvdM 07:52, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, they are widely used, especially in regular expressions. --Hetzer 15:51, 28 March 2006 (UTC)


 * They're still used on many plain text editors used by programmers, who understand regular expressions, but I haven't seen many other types of programs that use them. On my computer the only applications that allow regular expressions are Bean (free, open source), OmniOutliner (free for minimal version), and various programmer's editors.


 * This is probably because they would totally confuse most users, since most users don't even understand such basics are right-click and hierarchical filesystems. Bostoner (talk) 00:53, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Wildcards are more widely used now than ever before. Microsoft usually/often support regular expressions (which includes support for wildcards), for example in Visual Studio 2017, and/or their own simplified set of wildcards (* being the main one). Although apparently not in Microsoft Outlook currently :(. Search tool AgentRansack and UNIX/LINUX/Centos (& therefore most likely Apple's OS) support and use regular expressions in their various command shells.  Most modern computer languages (such a C#, Java, Javascript, TypeScript, PERL) support regular expressions because common libraries now provide easy-to-use, ready made, regex or regexp classes. Annoyingly Ebay deliberately removed their support of the * wild card several years ago (probably to improve performance or perhaps to "dumb it down"). Amazon & Google appear to support * in their search functionality.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 135.196.5.155 (talk) 10:17, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Merge?
What is there to gain from merging this article with the  article? I can't see the point of it. You would also have to merge it with the wildmat article as that is almost the same thing. I found this article when I was looking to find out the actual wildcard characters that are used in a SQL query statement. Knowing that they were different from those in Access I thought it might be useful to add that. I assumed this would be more of an article relating to actual wildcard characters from different environments where further examples could be added to assist others in their search for appropriate wildcard usage. Maybe wildcards are on the way out as DirkvdM suggested and there is no room for this old school stuff anymore. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bigsteworld (talk • contribs) 19:06, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Some notes on "?" and "*" wildcards behavior on files and directories
In Unix-like OS, the question mark matches exactly one character, not zero. Also, in MS-DOS, the way dots are handled seems to be special, since for example  matches   as well; maybe this should be mentioned. — 80.174.59.39 (talk) 00:19, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

EMail addresses
Are there any wildcard strings that can substitute for the part of the domain address that precedes the .com (or .org, etc.)? Tmangray (talk) 18:48, 18 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Most web browsers use '*' to match any domain portion for specifying inclusion/exclusion rules (e.g., '*.google.com' or '*.tv'). — Loadmaster (talk) 00:10, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I need to be connected to internet ecosystem UCI on my phone Yeuv john Mensah (talk) 17:45, 3 May 2018 (UTC)


 * internet ecosystem UCI Yeuv john Mensah (talk) 17:47, 3 May 2018 (UTC)