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HELP.110
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1991-06-02
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Wildcard Searching
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Power-QWK will search from the present position within the
current conference, either backwards or forwards, for messages
whose From, To and Subject fields match three user-supplied
Wildcard Patterns.
A Wildcard Pattern is a string of characters within which upper
and lower case have no significance and within which the symbols
? and * (question mark and asterisk) have special meaning when
the Pattern is matched against another string.
? in a Wildcard Pattern matches any character (but not null) at
the same position in the other string.
* in a Wildcard Pattern matches ANY NUMBER of characters,
including the null string, at the same position in the other
string.
e.g., the Wildcard Pattern ?ed* matches all of the following:
red, Red, ReD, RED, Bedding, TEDDINGTON, Redstone
BUT NOT Edward or edward or even ed.
Each of the three Patterns, From, To and Subject, may contain any
number of Wildcard characters (* and ?).
e.g., Setting Subject to the pattern *Amstrad* will find every
message which contains the word 'Amstrad' anywhere in its Subject
field.
Power-QWK gives all three fields an initial value of just *. This
value matches ANYTHING.
To set your Wildcard Patterns, use Alt/d or Alt/CursorDown for
Forwards searching; Alt/u or Alt/CursorUp for Backwards
searching.
Then, pressing F2 causes Power-QWK to locate each matching
message in the conference in turn, in the chosen direction,
starting from the present position.
So, to read every message in the current conference which came
from Steve Manners and included the word 'meet' in the Subject
field, do the following:
Press 'Home' (i.e., move to the first message in the conference).
Press Alt/d or Alt/CursorDown (for Forwards searching).
Set From=steve manners, press Return.
Set Subject=meet, press Return.
When you leave the Criteria screen, pressing F2 repeatedly will
allow you to read each matching message in turn.
Note that you probably don't need to enter all of the name.
Setting From=steve m* will locate all messages from people called
Steve whose second name starts with M. Also, for example, to
locate all messages with the word 'Amstrad' in the title, it is
probably sufficient to set Subject=*amst* (unless you receive a
lot of mail from folks who live in the capital of Holland!).
The patterns you supply remain fixed until such time as you
supply a new set. Thus, you can move from conference to
conference using the same set of Wildcard Patterns to search for
all matching messages.