Using Wild Card Characters

The wild card characters ’*’ and ’?’ can be used when filtering on text attributes (work item name, description, category, and so on.) — wild card characters cannot be used with any other attribute type.

The ’*’ and ’?’ characters are evaluated as follows:

  • ‘*’ matches zero or more of any character. For example:

    “bo*” matches anything beginning with “bo”. For example, “bo”, “bobbl”, “boulton_anne”, etc.

    “s*s” matches anything beginning with “s” and ending with “s”. For example, “ss”, “sues”, sid_lewis”, etc.

    “*s” matches anything ending with “s”. For example, “franks”, “ls”, “martha_lyons”, etc.

  • ‘?’ matches any single character. For example:

    “bill?” matches anything beginning with “bill”, plus one more character. For example, “bills”, “bill5”, “billh”, etc.

    “c?ndy” matches “cindy”, “candy”, “c3ndy”, etc.

Also note that:

  • all character matching is case sensitive.
  • you can use multiple wild card characters.