# Recoll user manual
Anchored searches and wildcards

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### More about wildcards

All words entered in Recoll search fields will be processed for wildcard expansion before the request is finally executed.

The wildcard characters are:

- `*` which matches 0 or more characters.

- `?` which matches a single character.

- `[]` which allow defining sets of characters to be matched (ex: `[``abc``]` matches a single character which may be 'a' or 'b' or 'c', `[``0-9``]` matches any number.

You should be aware of a few things when using wildcards.

- Using a wildcard character at the beginning of a word can make for a slow search because Recoll will have to scan the whole index term list to find the matches. However, this is much less a problem for field searches, and queries like `author:*@domain.com` can sometimes be very useful.

- For Recoll version 18 only, when working with a raw index (preserving character case and diacritics), the literal part of a wildcard expression will be matched exactly for case and diacritics. This is not true any more for versions 19 and later.

- Using a `*` at the end of a word can produce more matches than you would think, and strange search results. You can use the term explorer tool to check what completions exist for a given term. You can also see exactly what search was performed by clicking on the link at the top of the result list. In general, for natural language terms, stem expansion will produce better results than an ending `*` (stem expansion is turned off when any wildcard character appears in the term).

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