According to the book 70-489 Study Guide - Developing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Advanced Solutions (Chapter: "Building FQL Queries") it is still possible to use the question mark wildcard in SP 2013 FQL search requests. I tested it, and it isn't working like described.
Prerequisites
Lets say I have the following four documents that are crawled and can be found using the default search:
PROJ-3122-DEV.pdf
PROJ-3122-HELP.pdf
PROJ-5442-DEV.pdf
PROJECT_DEVELOPMENT.pdf
As described here, I created a custom result source to work with FQL. To test my queries, I'm using the SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool.
Testing
I need a search request that only returns documents matching the pattern PROJ-####-DEV.pdf
Here are the queries I tried with my expectations and the real results
Title:PROJ
Expected
PROJ-3122-DEV.pdf
PROJ-3122-HELP.pdf
PROJ-5442-DEV.pdf
PROJECT_DEVELOPMENT.pdf
Final
PROJ-3122-DEV.pdf
PROJ-3122-HELP.pdf
PROJ-5442-DEV.pdf
Title:PROJ*
Expected and final results are the same
PROJ-3122-DEV.pdf
PROJ-3122-HELP.pdf
PROJ-5442-DEV.pdf
PROJECT_DEVELOPMENT.pdf
Title:PROJ*DEV
Title:PROJ-*-DEV
Title:PROJ-????-DEV
Expected
PROJ-3122-DEV.pdf
PROJ-5442-DEV.pdf
Final
The query returned zero items
Remarks
As you can see, the search results are often times unexpected. Is there a way to get a simple pattern matching using question marks? As far as I know, the asterisk is used for zero or more characters including spaces, whereas the question mark is used exactly for one character. Maybe the problem with asterisks stems from the fact, that they can only be used for prefix searches; that would explain why Title:PROJ*DEV and Title:PROJ*-*DEV don't return results. So to match the four digits in the document title I assumed searching for PROJ-????-DEV would be the right way.
Additionally I checked the request-URL which contained encoded questionmarks (%3f); I replaced them with real questionmarks but the result was the same.
Any help regarding the topic and how to match that specific pattern would be really appreciated - thanks.
