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Wild Cards
The Find dialog in the 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]](images/foxfind.gif "FoxPro Find dialog")
If you tick the wildcards box then you can use the following codes in your search.
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. |
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. |
| <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. |
Hints & tips
The textbox class in Visual FoxPro 9 has a new Autocomplete
property which shows the user the previous values that have
been entered in that textbox.
Autocomplete in VFP 9
Your Access database will look more impressive if you add custom toolbars...
Custom toolbars
FoxPro has always had functions to read and write files at a low level...
Foxpro low level file functions
More...
More pages of hints and tips for users of Microsoft FoxPro and Access databases.