# Wildcards

## What are wildcards

Wildcards, or else you might call it [Regex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression), are a way to define not only a direct text to be matched in Public reply, but also a pattern. This can save you from having to define big list of rules manually, and instead tell Ticket Guardian about a pattern of text that you wish to be found.

Imagine your organisation have placeholders in a single public response template. We only need a pattern to be able to catch those placeholders and have a piece of mind when sending our response. For example:

```
Hello ACME_USERNAME,
We understand that you have concerns about ACME_PRODUCT.
In order to get this resolved and have ACME_PRODUCT delivered to you by ACME_DATE,
please, provide us with:
- ACME_LIST_OF_DOCUMENTS

Thank you,
ACME_AGENT
```

First thing that you might want to do is to define all those placeholders in Ticket Guardian separarely. But we can see a pattern - there is "ACME\_" prefix in front of all of them.

This means you can create only **one rule **~~**(**to rule them all)~~ `ACME_*` .

This a *Regex pattern*, and what is important here, is that your pattern will match all text that has **ACME\_** as prefix, where `*` means find **any character.**

## Recipes

1. Match all after text `foo` something:\
   `foo*`
2. Match all before text `foo`\
   `*foo`
3. Match only `foo_one` and `foo_two` but not `foo_three` or anything else:\
   `foo_(one|two)`

More examples will follow.

### Regular expressions

If you are feeling adventures and would like to try writing more advanced / different wildcards (which are regular expressions under the hood), here is a good starting point: [MDN Regular expressions](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_expressions).


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