Laserfiche Wildcards

Using wildcards and operators greatly improves your Laserfiche search capability. It will allow you to expand or restrict your searches. Making your searches more powerful.

What is a wildcard?

Wildcards represent unknown characters in a search. Some wildcard searchs allow operators, Thes operators are used to combining search terms or specify a search range.

Wildcards can be used in any search type: search bar searches, search filter searches or search syntax searches. Operators are generally used with search syntax searches.

Wildcards
Wildcards are used to represent one or more unknown characters in a search term. They are useful for searching for all documents containing variations of a word or when you are not sure of the exact characters contained in a word.

For example if

? (Question mark) Wildcard

The ? represents any single character.

Example: If you want to find all a word that may have two spellings such as Peterson Petersen

Your search syntax would be

Peters?n

* (Asterisk) Wildcard

The * represents any number of characters.

Example: If you would like to find all the words that start with light

Your search syntax would be

light*

this search would come up with results such as light, lights, and lightning

[] (Brackets) Wildcard

Brackets are also used as a wildcard for any single character in a set of characters.

Example: If you are looking to find “Smith” and “Smyth,” but no others.

Your search syntax would be

sm[iy]th

– (Dash) Operator

You can use a dash to indicates a range of characters.

For example, b[a-i]tter would find the words “batter,” “better” and “bitter,” but not “butter.”

Another example, if you wanted to find zip codes which is 5 digits in a row

Your search syntax would be

[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]

Combine wildcards

You can combine wild cards to create very powerful searches.

For example, br[a-o]ke* would find all of the following words: brake, braked, broke, broker, and broken.

?ake* would find bake, bakers, bakes, take, taken, takes, takers, make, maker

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