# Wildcards in Topics

TIBCO Enterprise Message Service enables you to use wildcards in topic names in some situations.

- You can subscribe to wildcard topics.

  If you subscribe to a topic containing a wildcard, you will receive any message published to a matching topic. For example, if you subscribe to `foo.*` you will receive messages published to a topic named `foo.bar`.

  You can subscribe to a wildcard topic (for example `foo.*`), whether or not there is a matching topic in the configuration file (for example, `foo.*`, `foo.>`, or `foo.bar`). However, if there is no matching topic name in the configuration file, no messages will be published on that topic.

- You cannot publish to wildcard topics.
- If `foo.bar` is not in the configuration file, then you can publish to `foo.bar` if `foo.*` or `foo.>` exists in the configuration file.
- On routed topic messages, subscribers must specify a topic that is a direct subset (or equal) of the configured global topic. For more information, see Wildcards.

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