# Escaping Special Characters in Wildcard Query **URL:** \ **Category:** Elasticsearch\ **Created:** [November 8, 2011, 8:53pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/escaping-special-characters-in-wildcard-query/5819 "2011-11-08T20:53:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 2
**Author:** ![Clinton\_Gormley](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/50afbb/32.png) [@Clinton\_Gormley](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Clinton_Gormley)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2011, 8:39am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/escaping-special-characters-in-wildcard-query/5819/2 "2011-11-09T08:39:11Z")
Hi Dawi > The elasticsearch documentation says that "The wildcard query maps to > lucene WildcardQuery". > [Elasticsearch Platform — Find real-time answers at scale | Elastic](http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/query-dsl/wildcard-query.html) > The Lucene documentation says that there is the following list of > special characters: > > - > - && || ! ( ) { } ^ " ~ \* ? : > and that they can be escaped using the \ before the character. > [Apache Lucene - Query Parser Syntax](http://lucene.apache.org/java/3_4_0/queryparsersyntax.html#Escaping%25) > 20Special%20Characters These special characters apply to the query\_string/field query, not to the wildcard query. The only special characters in the wildcard query are \* and ? > I have tried every form of escaping I can imagine but I was not able > to search for \* and ? using a wildcard query. I'm guessing that the field that you are trying to search against is analyzed with the standard analyzer? In which case, most punctuation is removed, so characters like \* will not exist in your terms, and thus won't be searchable Depending on what your data is, it make make sense to set your field to { index: not\_analyzed} clint --- _[View the full topic](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/escaping-special-characters-in-wildcard-query/5819)._