Wildcards

In dbForge Studio for SQL Server, you can use wildcards in the Find and Replace window to search for text patterns instead of exact matches. Wildcards are special placeholder characters that match different types of text elements—such as any single character, digit, or sequence of characters.

To select a required wildcard in the Find and Replace window, do the following:

1. In the Find and Replace window, select Use and choose Wildcards from the drop-down list.
2. Click the arrow button and select a wildcard from the list.

The selected wildcard is inserted into Find what.

When you use wildcards, they match one or more characters in your search pattern. For example, the search pattern cust* uses the * wildcard to find any text that starts with cust followed by zero or more characters. This pattern will match cust, customer, customers, customer_id, and customer_orders in all open documents.

The list contains the following wildcards:

Syntax	Expression	Description
?	Any single character	Matches any single character.
#	Any single digit	Matches any single digit. For example, 5# matches numbers that include 5 followed by another number, such as 51, but not 15.
[!]	Characters not in set	Matches any character that is not specified in the set.
\	Escape	Matches the character that follows the backslash (\) as a literal. This allows you to find the characters used in wildcard notation, such as * and #.
*	Zero or more characters	Matches zero or more characters. For example, test* matches test, testing, and testfile.txt.
[]	Set of characters	Matches a character from the specified set.