Wildcard search Leave feedback
Wildcard search allows you to search for words with unknown letters or ranges of letters.
In text form of a search query, there are 2 forms of wildcard characters:
- ? for a single character;
- ?(n~m) for a group of characters, where n and m are numbers from 0 to 255, and n <= m.
Wildcard search is similar to regular expression search, but it works significantly faster when groups of wildcard characters are less and closer to the end of a search query.
It is important to know that wildcard search is flexible enough to use for prefix queries, since prefix query is a special case of a wildcard query.
Examples of wildcard search with queries in text form are presented below.
const indexFolder = 'c:/MyIndex/';
const documentsFolder = 'c:/MyDocuments/';
// Creating an index in the specified folder
const index = new groupdocs.search.Index(indexFolder);
// Indexing documents from the specified folder
index.add(documentsFolder);
// Search in the index
const query1 = 'm???is';
const result1 = index.search(query1); // Search for 'mauris', 'mollis', 'mattis', 'magnis', etc.
const query2 = 'pri?(1~7)';
const result2 = index.search(query2); // Search for 'private', 'principles', 'principle', etc.
To build a query for the wildcard search in object form, use the WordPattern class. This class contains methods for adding known parts of a word and wildcards to a template. An example of constructing a query in object form is presented below.
const indexFolder = 'c:/MyIndex/';
const documentsFolder = 'c:/MyDocuments/';
// Creating an index in the specified folder
const index = new groupdocs.search.Index(indexFolder);
// Indexing documents from the specified folder
index.add(documentsFolder);
// Search with pattern "m???is"
// Search for 'mauris', 'mollis', 'mattis', 'magnis', etc.
const pattern1 = new groupdocs.search.WordPattern();
pattern1.appendString('m');
pattern1.appendOneCharacterWildcard();
pattern1.appendOneCharacterWildcard();
pattern1.appendOneCharacterWildcard();
pattern1.appendString('is');
const query1 = groupdocs.search.SearchQuery.createWordPatternQuery(pattern1);
const result1 = index.search(query1);
// Search with pattern "pri?(1~7)"
// Search for 'private', 'principles', 'principle', etc.
const pattern2 = new groupdocs.search.WordPattern();
pattern2.appendString('pri');
pattern2.appendWildcard(1, 7);
const query2 = groupdocs.search.SearchQuery.createWordPatternQuery(pattern2);
const result2 = index.search(query2);
You may easily run the code from documentation articles and see the features in action in our GitHub examples:
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You are welcome to search over your PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX and more with our free online Free Online Document Search App.
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