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A wildcard (?) is a substitute character that can stand for all possible characters.

For example, when calling files and programs, it is possible that several files with similar sounding names are called at the same time. For example, if there are the files ITWissenA, ITWissenB, ITWissenC, ... to ITWissenZ, all 26 files can be called with ITWissen? The question mark "?" is therefore the "joker". The question mark usually stands for a single character. This depends entirely on the system and its syntax. It is different with the wildcard, which is generally represented by an asterisk. It stands for any character string. For example, the command *,* calls all files of a dataset, the search for all files with the file extension "bmp" is done with the input *.bmp.

With the question mark, the call W?ld would return forest and game as results. With the input M*m, on the other hand, all words beginning with "M" and ending with "m".