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Use of asterisk

Strings within quotes ask for exact matches. Some times, however, we want to give only a substring of the intended match. The asterisk if employed in these cases, as illustrated in the following example:

--> find device "roof*"

The asterisk (*) represents any possible string placed in its position. In the example, the string "roof cam" will match the inquiry.

Asterisks can be used with or without quotes. The following examples are equivalent to the previous one.

--> find device "roof"*
--> find device roof*

The use of quotes and asterisk together is better justified in cases where the substring contains more that one word, as for example:

--> find device "digital video *"

possibly intended to match "digital video HD" and "digital video SD".

We can place more that one asterisk in the string. For example,

--> find device "*-SDI *PUT"

will match any of the following values:

   SD-SDI INPUT
   SD-SDI OUTPUT
   HD-SDI INPUT
   HD-SDI OUTPUT