What does '*?' mean inside Set Analysis?

[jblomqvist]

Hi,

If you have Country={'*?'} as set analysis, what does '*?' mean please?

And what does Country={'*'} mean?

And finally if it is, Sum({$-<Country={'*?'}>}Sales) what does this mean?

[petter]

You can read about what wildcards mean here:

https://help.qlik.com/en-US/sense/September2018/Subsystems/Hub/Content/Sense_Hub/Selections/Selectio...

Using wildcards in a search in a set expression should be exactly the same - so even if the documentation is for how you use wildcards interactively it does apply for set expressions too.

Note that searches in all the newer releases of Qlik Sense need to use double quotation marks to work. You have examples with single quotation marks which works in olde Qlik Sense versions but not the newer ones...

[juraj_misina]

If you have Country={'*?'} as set analysis, what does '*?' mean please?

"*?" means any non-empty string (* means string of any lenght, ? means one character).

And what does Country={'*'} mean?

This basicaly means any value in Country field (including empty strings, but not null values!)

And finally if it is, Sum({$-<Country={'*?'}>}Sales) what does this mean?

I'm not 100% sure about this one, this would sum Sales for current selections (the $ sign) excluding all records with value in Country field (-<Country={'*?'}>), so in the end it could consider all records for current selections where Country=null.

[jblomqvist]

Hi Juraj,

What if it was written as {'?*'}

I switched the ? to be in front of the * from my original example.

[juraj_misina]

The meaning is exactly the same. ? and * are both wildcards where

"?" means exactly 1 character (e.g. Country = 'S' or Country = 'C')

"*" means any number of characters (e.g. Country ='S' or Country = 'C' or Country = 'Slovakia' or Country = '')

If you want to make sure that value Country field contains at least one character, then you can use "*?" or "?*". They are basically the same, because they mean "any number of characters followed by exactly one character" and "exactly one character followed by any number of characters" respectively.