Wildcards v2.5

Wildcards Overview

Wildcards make searches more flexible. They help you:

• Find characters that are not broken apart by tokenizers.

• Expand results so you don’t miss anything.

• Handle inconsistent or messy naming.

• Search for specific character patterns.

• Catch possible misspellings.

This chapter covers the three wildcards you’ll use most: *, ?, and ~.

Learn more about the logic of searching without wildcards →

* Wildcard

The asterisk (*) replaces zero or more characters.

It’s the most common and most powerful wildcard because it helps you work around inconsistencies and unpredictable naming.

✏️ Using *, especially at the beginning of a query, can slow down performance because it forces Diskover to search much more data.

✏️ If you always want Diskover to automatically add * around your search terms, you can enable Predictive Search in your settings. This guide assumes it is turned off.

? Wildcard

The question mark (?) replaces a single character.

Use multiple ? to match an exact number of characters.

✏️ The * wildcard could be used instead of multiple ? characters, but it may return results outside your intended character range since * replaces zero or more characters. Use ? when precision matters.

~ Wildcard

The tilde (~) is the fuzziness wildcard, used to find words that are similar—including many common misspellings.

• By default, ~ allows up to 2 character changes.

• Best practice is to use ~1, which limits the search to 1 character change, and still catches about 80% of human misspellings.

⚠️ IMPORTANT! ~ searches are resource-intensive and may cause slowdowns or timeout errors.

🔆 What counts as a “change”? This is determined by the Damerau-Levenshtein distance, which includes:

• Inserting a character.

• Deleting a character.

• Substituting a character.

• Swapping two adjacent characters.

Mixing Wildcards

Mixing wildcards can be tricky. Below are a few examples, but note that additional rules apply when combining wildcards, such as the order in which they are used.