How to use wildcards to find contacts or calls efficiently
| Summary | This article describes how to use the "wildcard" feature in Supervisor to find and update sample contacts. |
| Applies to | AskiaField |
| Written for | Supervisors, field managers |
| Keywords | wildcard; find contact; |
Introduction
In Supervisor, the "Find/Edit contact" feature allows you to quickly display all contacts that correspond to a manually defined parameter.
In the screenshot below, I'm displaying all contacts whose "Contact State" is "Unused", i.e. who have not been contacted yet.
In cases where the "value" column is not simply a list of choices, but an "open" field, you can use a few wildcards to substitute characters in the search bar, thus improving flexibility of contact searches.
Typically, the "Phone Number" parameter is a good candidate to use wildcards on. In a scenario where one would like to display all French phone numbers (starting with 0033 or 33), or all numbers belonging to one specific American area code, a wildcard is the fastest way to show all these numbers, and exclude any other from the displayed results.
Available wildcards
| * | Matches any character or set of characters |
| ? | Matches any single character |
| [] | Matches one single character among the ones included in the brackets |
| ^ | Negation wildcard. The negated expression must be included between [] square brackets. |
| - | Used to create number or letter ranges. The range must be included between [] square brackets |
| \ | Would you need not to use one of the previous characters as a wildcard, but as a classic character, you can protect it by using the anti-slash right before it. |
Examples
In this set of examples, wildcards will be used on the "Phone number" parameter to demonstrate wildcards combined with digits, and with "Email address" to demonstrate wildcards used with letters.
Numbers
*
"Include if" "Phone number" "equals" 0033*.
This will match all numbers that start with 0033. Indeed, the "*" wildcard matches any possible combination of characters after 0033.
[]
"Include if" "Phone number" "equals" [012]3333333.
This will match 03333333, 13333333 and 23333333.
"Include if" "Phone number" "equals" [0-5]33.
This will match 033, 133, 233, 333, 433 and 533.
"Include if" "Phone number" "equals" 0[^012]*.
This will match all numbers that start by 0, followed by any character except 0, 1 and 2.
"Include if" "Phone number" "equals" 0[^0-7]*.
This will match all numbers that start by 0, followed by any character except 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
?
"Include if" "Phone number" "equals" 0?3*.
This will match all numbers that start by 0, followed by any character, then followed by a 3.
Letters
In the same fashion, these wildcards apply to letters.
*
"Include if" "Email address" "equals" *@gmail.com.
Displays all contacts whose email address ends with "@gmail.com".
\
"Include if" "Email address" "contains" \*.
Displays all contacts whose email address contain a * character.
You could get the same list by using this:
"Include if" "Email address" "equals" *\**.
In this case, the first and last "*" are interpreted and will match any string of characters, whereas the second one will just match the actual "*" character.
Find calls
These wildcards are also all usable in the "Find calls" view.