How to use wildcards

A wildcard is a character that can be used as a substitute for any of a class of characters in a search, thereby greatly increasing the flexibility and efficiency of Nihuo Web Log Analyzer.

Wildcards are used in filtering system and including multi log files in one directory. In Nihuo Web Log Analyzer, you can use the following metacharacters:

• Asterisk ( * )—Matches any string of characters.
• Question mark ( ? )—Matches any single character.

Asterisk Wildcard

The asterisk wildcard has the broadest meaning of any of the wildcards, as it can represent zero characters, all single characters or any string.

As an example, requested file hit filter

Question Mark Wildcard

The question mark (?) is used as a wildcard character to represent exactly one character, which can be any single character. Thus, two question marks in succession would represent any two characters in succession, and three question marks in succession would represent any string consisting of three characters.

The following examples demonstrates how to use wildcards:

1. *.mp3
   Match all mp3 files.
   

   String Matched song.mp3 Yes downloads/1.mp3 Yes song.mp32 No song.mp3.zip No song.mp4 No mp3.pls No

   
   
2. mp3*
   Match files which is prefixed with "mp3"
   

   String Matched song.mp3 No mp3.pls Yes mp3downlaod/1.wma Yes song.mp4 No

   
   
3. *mp3*
   Match all files and all directories containing the string "mp3"
   

   String Matched downloads/1.mp3 Yes song.mp32 Yes song.mp3.zip Yes mp3.pls Yes mp3downlaod/1.wma Yes testmp32/1.wma Yes song.mp4 No

   
   
4. /mp3/*
   Match all files under /mp3 directory, including everything under this subdirectory.
   

   String Matched downloads/1.mp3 No song.mp3.zip No /mp3/wma/1.wma Yes /mp3/1.wma Yes /download/mp3/1.mp3 No

   
   
5. ex200710??.log
   Match all iis log files generated in Oct 2007
   

   String Matched ex20071005.log Yes ex20071005.zip No ex20071005-2.log No access20071005.log No

   
   
6. *200710??.log
   Match all log files generated in Oct 2007
   

   String Matched ex20071005.log Yes ex20071005.zip No ex20071005-2.log No access20071005.log Yes

   
   
7. *.google.*
   

   String Matched http://www.gooogle.com Yes https://www.gooogle.com Yes https://www.gooogle.co.uk Yes https://www.gooogleblog.com No

Back To Log Analysis Tutoria