Headword wildcard search is needed

[Tvangeste]

Typical wildcard search for the headwords would be very useful. Here's how Lingvo does it:

“?” replaces any letter (including a blank).
“*” replaces any sequence of letters (including blanks).

Example:

f?llow
This wildcard matches the words fellow, follow, fallow, etc.

summ*r
This wildcard matches the words summer, summator, etc., as well as the phrases summable filter, summing counter, etc.

[dragonroot]

This is possible to implement, though there's a question here: how does one differentiate between normal search and a wildcard one? Is the presence of a wild card the sole indicator?

[Tvangeste]

Here's how Lingvo does it. By default, the wildcard search is off. They use Ctrl-F3 shortcut to enable it. Not very discoverable approach. And for the full-text search they use a special button on the toolbar.

So, 3 search modes (including the default mode), 3 different ways of enabling them, not good.

Given the current trends in browsers, where everything can be done straight from the address bar, we could try out something like that.

Alternatively, We could add checkboxes or something like that, to the same component that currently holds group selector. And so, all 3 modes (when they are eventually implemented) could be triggered uniformly right from the UI, from the single place.

[Tvangeste]

Also, worth noting a couple of things:

1. Wildcard search should probably search only over the actual headwords, not doing anything more complicated (like morpho). This will be in sync with Lingvo.
2. I'm not sure I like their approach to * wildcard, which matches spaces. Maybe, it would be better for * to mean - anything without spaces, so that w_k would only much things like wok, work, week, but not "when it rains I always go for a walk". For multiple-word matches, we might consider, e.g. *_ - double star.

[nashbridges]

+1 for wildcards or regular expressions

[chulai]

+1 for wildcards search
http://goldendict.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1684
http://goldendict.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=969&p=4071#p4071
http://goldendict.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1821&p=7864#p7864

[khughitt]

+1 for wildcards.

It's especially useful for finding chinese words that contain or end with a character.

[Abs62]

Done in last EA builds.