Wild Cards
The Find dialog in the Visual FoxPro editor has a tick box labelled
'Use wildcards'. You are probably familiar with the '?' and '*'
wild cards to match one character or many characters but FoxPro goes
further than this.
![[Find dialog in Visual FoxPro]](../media/images/foxfind.gif "FoxPro Find dialog")
If you tick the wildcards box then you can use the familiar '?' and '*'
codes in your search as well as a few more from the world of regular
expressions..
Wild Cards
| Wild card |
Matches |
| ? |
any single character except a NewLine. |
| * |
any number of characters - even zero. |
| # |
a single digit. |
| < |
the start of a word. |
| > |
the end of a word. |
| [] |
a group of characters. |
Examples
| Example |
Matches |
| a?e |
'are', 'database', 'A/e',
|
| 8?7 |
'1817', '8a7', and 'B48
7PQ' - remember that a space counts as a character.
|
| a*e |
'Alvechurch', 'database',
and 'Mary had a little lamb' because * matches any
number of characters - including one.
|
| 8*7 |
'SER#83/3471a', '1817', and '87'
because * matches any number of characters - including no characters
at all.
|
| B## |
postcodes from 'B10' to 'B49' but not 'B1'
because the expression specifies two digits and 'B1' has
just a single digit.
|
| <B |
any word starting with 'B' or 'b'.
|
| #> |
any expression ending with a digit.
|
Groups
You can group characters together inside square brackets and search for an
expression matching any one of these characters. A '!' before the group
searches for any expression except one of the grouped characters.
| Example |
Matches |
| [a-m] |
any character between 'a' and 'm' inclusive. |
| [123] |
any character matching '1', '2', or '3'. |
| [a-m].> |
any sentence ending with the letters 'a' to 'm' inclusive. |
| [!a-z].> |
any sentence ending with a non-alphabetical character. |
|
Wild cards make searches more powerful and flexible in Access
Read More
|
Searching a web site with JavaScript
Read More
|
How to set the default search options in a Microsoft Access database
Read More
|
|
