Regular Expression Wildcard Matching

Question

I have a list of about 120 thousand english words (basically every word in the language).

I need a regular expression that would allow searching through these words

Answer 1

Unless you want some funny behaviour, I would recommend you use \w instead of .

. matches whitespace and other non-word symbols, which you might not want it to do.

So I would replace ? with \w and replace * with \w*

Also if you want * to match at least one character, replace it with \w+ instead. This would mean that ben* would match bend and bending but not ben - it's up to you, just depends what your requirements are.