Allow Wildcards in Searches

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I used to own a Dell Axim running Windows mobile that had an incredibly 
powerful J-E dictionary. What made it so powerful, aside from its massive size, 
was the ability to include wildcards in searches. '?' represented 1 character,  
while '*' represented 0 or more characters. 

A search for 'た?り' would pull up 'たより', 'たまり', 'たもり', 
etc...
Similarly, searching 'た*り' pulls up all of the above,  plus many others, 
including 'たっぷり', 'たり', 'たんまり', 'たちまわり', etc...

I know the "Jishou" app provides limited '*' wildcard searches,  and that the 
"Akebi" app provides unfortunately inconsistent wildcard searches using both  
'*' and  '?'.

In Aedict, this type of search would be most useful when conducting "exact" 
searches.  You could replicate your "begins with" and "ends with" search 
functionality by placing an asterisk at the end or beginning respectively, 
offering the potential to remove some clutter from the interface. 

I don't know if your databases could support such a search or how difficult it 
would be to code, but if you could pull it off,  Aedict would remain 
permanently unbeatable.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by jebj...@gmail.com on 8 Mar 2015 at 2:40

[mvysny]

Sorry mate, I just tried such searches and Lucene finds nothing, for unknown reasons. E.g. I tried to search for 見? in hope to find miru but Lucene find nothing. So, I have to mark this as won't fix :(

[pouncingant]

I see the wontfix and the reasoning. Is it possible to, for the above "見?" example, to do a "..見.." search, then filter the results through some code before presenting only those that fit the "見?" pattern, rather than rely on the function being in-built to lucene?
I also see there are thousands of open issues, and guess you are unlikely to have time to work on this, but to be frank, I've still yet to find a dictionary that is as useful for technical translation on-the-go, and this change could be very handy for poorly photocopied text.

[mvysny]

Hmm, so basically if you put 見* or 見? into the search box, this will override the search setting and will activate the ..見.. search? This is a great idea! Even better:
Any text ending with '*' or '?' will activate the "見.." search; any text starting with '*' or '?' will activate the "..見" search; any text both starting and ending with '*' or '?' will activate the "..見..". What do you think?