How to use wildcard characters in word

Word wildcard characters can be used to find and replace specific patterns in a document, including question marks (find a single character), asterisks (find any number of characters), square brackets (find a specified range of characters), and hyphens (Find all characters in the specified range). For example, to find all words containing "john", you can use the wildcard "john*"; to replace all "com" with "net", you can use "com -> net". Additionally, wildcards are not case-sensitive, greedy search defaults to matching as many characters as possible, and regular expression wildcards can be used for more advanced searches and replaces.

Usage of wildcard characters in Word

Wildcard characters are special characters used to find and replace patterns in documents. Word provides a variety of wildcard characters, each with its own unique purpose.

Question mark (?)

Question mark matches any single character. For example:

• "W?" Finds words that start with "W" and are followed by any characters.
• "a?e" finds words containing the letters "a" and "e" with only one character in between.

Asterisk (*)

The asterisk matches any number of characters (including zero characters). For example:

• "com*" finds any word that begins with "com".
• "*able" Finds any word ending with "able".
• "*" Find any character.

Square brackets ([ ])

Square brackets match any single character within the specified range. For example:

• "[abc]" finds any word containing the letters "a", "b", or "c".
• "[A-Z]" Find uppercase letters.
• "[a-z0-9]" Find lowercase letters or numbers.

Hyphen (-)

The hyphen matches all characters in the specified range. For example:

• "a-z" finds lowercase letters.
• "1-9" finds the numbers 1 to 9.
• "A-Fa-f" finds uppercase and lowercase letters "A" through "F".

Example

• Find all words containing "john": john*
• Replace all "com" with "net": com -> net
• Remove all numbers in the document: [0- 9]

Note

• Wildcard characters are not case-sensitive.
• Wildcard search defaults to a greedy search, which means it will match as many characters as possible. Use a question mark (?) after an asterisk (*) to perform a non-greedy search, that is, only match necessary characters.
• You can use regular expression wildcards for more advanced searches and replacements.

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