Wildcard characters allow you to enter pieces of information and narrow your search criteria.
You can use characters such as the percent sign (%), which represents any number of characters, or an underscore (_), which represents a single character. You can also use brackets to include ([ ]) or exclude ([^]) specific characters from your search criteria.
We have outlined a description and provided examples for each of the wildcard characters in the table.
| Wildcard Character | Description | Examples |
| % | The percent sign represents any number of characters, including letters, spaces, numbers and punctuation. | For example, if you want to search for a specific person, but can’t remember if the person’s last name isRichardsonorRichmond, you can enter Rich% in the Last Name field. The Search Results window displays all persons whose last names begin with Rich, and may include names like Richards, Richardson, Richie, orRichmond. |
| _ | The underscore represents only one character. | For example, you are not sure if the applicant’s first name was Jan, Jen, Jon, and so forth. In the First Name field, you can type J_n and it will return anyone a first name that starts with J and ends with N with one character in between the J and N. |
| [ ] | The brackets [ ] represent that you want the results to contain any of the specified character set or character range in that position | If you search for [LD][ao]wson, you would receive the following results: Lawson, Lowson, Dawson, Dowson, and so forth. |
| [^] | The brackets containing the carat symbol allow you to exclude the specified characters or any characters within a specified range in that position | If you search for M[^a]c%, the system returns all names that begin with M that do not contain A as the second letter. In other words, the search results would contain McDonald, but no MacDonald. |