StringMatchQ

StringMatchQ is used to check whether a whole string matches a certain pattern.

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StringMatchQ is special in that it also allows the metacharacters * and @ to be entered as wildcards (for backwards compatibility reasons). * is equivalent to ShortestMatch[___] (RegularExpression["(?s).*?"]) and @ is equivalent to Except[CharacterRange["A","Z"]] (RegularExpression["[^A-Z]"]).

The following three patterns are therefore equivalent.

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Note that technically the appearance of ShortestMatch does not make a difference here, since we are only looking for a possible match.

If you need to access parts of the string matched by subpatterns in the pattern, use StringCases instead.

StringMatchQ has a SpellingCorrection option for finding matches allowing for a small number of discrepancies. This only works for patterns consisting of a single literal string.

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