- Wildcard character
: "For other meanings of 'wild card' see
wild card ."The term wildcard character has the following meanings:Telecommunication
In
telecommunication s, a wildcard character is a
character that may be substituted for any of a defined subset of all possible characters.* In
high-frequency (HF)radio automatic link establishment , the wildcard character "?" may be substituted for any one of the 36 characters, "A" through "Z" and "0" through "9."
* Whether the wildcard character represents a single character or a string of characters must be specified.Computing
In
computer (software ) technology, a wildcard character can be used to substitute for any other character or characters in a string. Theasterisk (*) usually substitutes as a wildcard character for any zero or more characters, and thequestion mark (?) usually substitutes as a wildcard character for any one character, as in thecommand line interpreter s ofCP/M ,DOS ,Microsoft Windows andUnix-like operating system s. This is referred to as glob expansion.InSQL , wildcard characters can be used in "LIKE" expressions; thepercent sign (%) matches zero or more characters, andunderscore (_) a single character. InMicrosoft Access , wildcard characters can be used in "LIKE" expressions; theasterisk sign (*) matches zero or more characters, andquestion mark (?) a single character. In manyregular expression implementations, the period (.) is the wildcard character for a single character.References
*
Federal Standard 1037C and fromMIL-STD-188 ee also
*
glob (programming)
*Wildcard DNS record
*wildmat External links
* [http://www.linfo.org/wildcard.html How to Use Wildcards]
* [http://shwild.org/ shwild: Shell-compatible wildcards (C/C++)]
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