Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index The term wildcard character has the following meanings: Telecommunication In telecommunications, a wildcard character is a character that may be substituted for any of a defined subset of all possible characters. In high-frequency (HF) radio automatic link establishment, the wildcard character "?" may be substituted for any one of the 36 characters, "A" through "Z" and "0" through "9." Whether the wildcard character represents a single character or a string of characters must be specified. Computing In computer (software) technology, a wildcard character can be used to substitute for any other character or characters in a string. The asterisk (*) usually substitutes as a wildcard character for any zero or more characters, and the question mark (?) usually substitutes as a wildcard character for any one character, as in the MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows and POSIX (Unix) shells. In SQL, the wildcard characters are percent (%) for zero or more characters, and underline (_) for one character. In many regular expression implementations, the period (.) is the wildcard character for a single character. Source: originally from Federal Standard 1037C and from MIL-STD-188 See also wild card This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.