In the catalog search facility, you can use wildcards to receive a wider range of results. The search facility supports substitutions where you can specify a single wildcard (*) or double wildcards (**) or a combination of these - for example, *AA.**.B*B.
When using one or more wildcards in the dataset name field, the returned entries are limited to those that fall within the wildcard parameters. It is possible to use both a single * and multiple ** or a single * multiple times.
Using a dot, ., in your search expressions can affect the search results. The dot, ., is a significant character within a dataset name as it is a name node separator and, when used in a search expression, will be interpreted as such. This means that the returned results only have a certain number of nodes and the characters in those node names match the wildcard pattern passed for each node. If you receive unexpected results, check your use of the dot.
Specifying double wildcards, **, in search expressions helps avoid problems with interpreting the dots because the double wildcards indicate any number of modes. They indicate that any number of characters, including dots, may appear between the significant characters.
To demonstrate how this works, let's look at performing a few searches for the following example catalog:
MFITEST.AAA.01 MFITEST.BBB.01 MFITEST.CCC.01 MFITEST.DDD.EEE.01