Search with Wildcard

[Uvisc]

Hello

I want a string search/compare with wildcard. I'm trying to create a "crypto crossword" application and got most of the code working but the wildcard thing was harder than I thought.

Basically I want the program to compare if "H**LO" is equal to "HELLO" (true). But "HE*" is NOT equal to "HELLO". I tried with regex but the number of wildcard is different each time and in different places so I never managed to make it work. Any help is appreciated.

 

[JohnH]

Traditionally in wildcard searches * means any string and ? means a single char, so it is also with Like Operator (Visual Basic)
With regex a ? can be expressed as \w if 'word' chars is to be matched, I recommend for example this place for learning that Regular-Expressions.info - Regex Tutorial, Examples and Reference - Regexp Patterns