Appendix B - Effective Keyword Searches > Wildcard and special characters

Special characters are symbols that can represent a range of possible results. The following table shows a list of these and their meanings.

Special character	Meaning
?	Matches any single character
=	Matches any single digit
*	Matches any number of characters
%	Adds fuzziness to the search (see Fuzzy search requests)
#	Applies phonetic searching to particular words (see Phonetic searches)
~	Applies stemming rules to particular words (see Stemming rules)

Note: Using special characters may increase the time required for search results to display.

Using multiple or leading special characters can cause very slow results.

The following table shows three examples of how to use special characters.

To find all documents containing…	Type this:
The words "apple" and "application"	appl*
The words "apple" or "apply"	appl?
Either 92.168.10.85 or 192.168.10.25	192.168.10.=5