WILDCARD CHARACTERS

[Guest]

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND ANY OF THE FOLLOWING...PLEASE ILLUSTRATE EXAMPLES, USING,
eg. THE =IF(......) FUNCTION THE USE OF:

?
*
and
~

Wildcard characters
The following wildcard characters can be used as comparison criteria
(criteria: Conditions you specify to limit which records are included in the
result set of a query or filter. For example, the following criterion selects
records for which the value for the Order Amount field is greater than
30,000: Order Amount > 30000.) for filters, and when searching and replacing
content.

Use To find
? (question mark) Any single character
For example, sm?th finds "smith" and "smyth"

* (asterisk) Any number of characters
For example, *east finds
"Northeast"
and "Southeast"

~ (tilde) followed by ?, *, or ~ A question mark, asterisk, or tilde
For example, fy91~? finds "fy91?"


PLEASE EXPLAIN.

Thanks,

FLKulchar

 

[Gary Keramidas]

do you have windows xp? go into help and search for wildcard.

here are some examples:

an * means all characters

so in your honda example, *honda*

Ahonda, ABChonda, Ahonda123 will all match because the * means any characters in
front of honda and any characters after honda as long as there is the word honda
any where in the string

?

this means any individual character, one character per ?

so

Ahonda, 1honda, will satisfy the condition ?honda

ABhonda 12honda will satisfy the condition ??honda

honda1 will satisfy the condtion honda?

Ahonda will not satisfy the condition ??honda because it's looking for 2
characters in front of the word honda.

 

[Guest]

How come the following returna a FALSE result:

A B

1 wab =(A1=?ab)
2
3
4

 

[Peter T]

=ISERROR(SEARCH("?ab",A1))=FALSE

Regards,
Peter T