Tips for searching our Approved Supplier data and using wildcards in your searches.

The default search behavior of our interfaces allow end users to enter search text without any additional wildcards at the beginning or end of the text.  If you enter the word Motorola, the query will execute %Motorola% with the % wildcards entered automatically.  This executes a broad search of the database and returns everything with the word Motorola in it regardless of what precedes or follows the text.  If you knew the manufacture name to be Motorola but only know the first letter or 2 of the part number that follows it, you could enter the text, Motorola MC68, and return only records with that sequence of characters.  This effectively allows drill down capabilities to find what you're looking for from increasingly smaller result sets.  Every time you add a character(s) to the string based on what is returned from each query, you can decrease the quantity of records returned and more easily find what your looking for.

If you were to search for the string DALE CMF you could exclude a lot of data because it might be in the database with 1 to as many as 3 spaces between the words DALE and CMF. To work around this use the wildcard character %. A query run with the search string DALE%CMF will return all occurrences of DALE CMF regardless of how many spaces are between the 2 words.

If you want to search for a 1% resistor, you have to bracket the [%] symbol with square brackets so the query engine knows you want to search for the literal value of 1%.

Here are a few examples;

10 Returns all occurrences of 10 with any characters before or after it

10[%] Returns all occurrences of 10%

10[%]%T Returns all occurrences of 10% where a T follows in the string like 10% (T/R) with any characters between 10% and T.

Additional information from our library;

Wildcard Meaning

% Any string of zero or more characters

_ Any single character

[ ] Any single character within the specified range (for example, [a-f]) or set (for example, [abcdef])

[^] Any single character not within the specified range (for example, [^a - f]) or set (for example, [^abcdef])

_heryl searches for all six-letter names ending with the letters heryl (Cheryl, Sheryl).

[CK]ars[eo]n searches for Carsen, Karsen, Carson, and Karson (Carson).

[M-Z]inger searches for all names ending with the letters inger that begin with any single letter from M to Z (Ringer).

M[^c] searches for all names beginning with the letter M that don’t have the letter c as the second letter (MacFeather).

Symbol Meaning

5[%] 5%

5% 5 followed by any string of 0 or more characters

[_]n _n

_n an, in, on (and so on)

[a-cdf] a, b, c, d, or f

[-acdf] -, a, c, d, or f

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