The extraction anchor must end with the wildcard character *. However, you can also use the wildcard within the extraction anchor, as part of it. Consider the following HTML code and say, you want to extract the salary.
<li>
<nobr>
<font face="Verdana" size="-1">
<b>Salary:</b>33,000.00 per year
</font>
</nobr>
</li>
One extraction anchor would for example be
EXTRACT POS=1 TYPE=TXT ATTR=<FONT<SP>face=Verdana<SP>size=-1><B>Salary:</B>*
In this example, you can now substitute any parts of the anchor with the wildcard. The reason for doing this might be that the web site changes from time to time or you just need to have a more compact extraction anchor.
Suppose the font face changes every now and then, resulting in some unsuccessful extraction. You can easily change the anchor to
EXTRACT POS=1 TYPE=TXT ATTR=<FONT<SP>face=*<SP>size=-1><B>Salary:</B>*
If the size also changes, you can change it to
EXTRACT POS=1 TYPE=TXT ATTR=<FONT<SP>face=*<SP>size=*><B>Salary:</B>*
or even
EXTRACT POS=1 TYPE=TXT ATTR=<FONT*><B>Salary:</B>*
If the extraction is successful, the extract text is "Salary: 33,000.00 per year".
Page URL http://www.iopus.com/imacros/help/extract_using_wildcards.htm