Whether the unknown places occur at the beginning, end or in the middle is irrelevant. The number of placeholders used is also arbitrary.^[26]

1SF*7102R7000

1SFA8*102R*000

In V11, individual positions could be replaced with the placeholder (?). Although this placeholder also works in V12, the placeholder (*) is simpler and more flexible, as it can stand for none, one or more characters.

1SFA8?
?102R?000

If the unknown section is delimited by spaces, separators such as periods or characters of a different type (numeric/alphanumeric), the placeholder is not required.

Alphanumeric search:

Terms are broken down into meaningful partial terms (partial strings according to the dictionary) by default.

With table you can also find table top without using the placeholder *.

However, you cannot find what you are looking for with Tisc. In this case, you must use the wildcard search and search with Tisc *.

Numerical search:

123 * 567 *

No stemming is used for a wildcard search.^[27] is executed. * screw only finds screw and not screw. If you want to find both, you must specify *chraube*.

A wildcard search is always associated with a certain loss of performance. However, it depends on how many hits there are. For example, a search for s* is significantly slower than a search for *screw. If a search for s* is carried out across a large number of catalogs, it can happen that the PARTapplicationServer aborts the search because it would cost too much performance. In this case, an error message such as: Placeholder search too general. Restrict the search further by entering additional letters or numbers. [Wildcard search too general. Narrow down the search by specifying additional letters or numbers.]