Need regular expression that will work to find numeric and alpha characters in a string - numeric

Question

Here's what I'm trying to do. A user can type in a search string, which can include '*' or '?' wildcard characters. I'm finding this works with regular strings but not with ones including numeric characters.
e.g:
414D512052524D2E535441524B2E4E45298B8751202AE908
1208
if I look for a section of that hex string, it returns false. If I look for "120" or "208" in the "1208" string it fails.
Right now, my regular expression pattern ends up looking like this when a user enters, say "w?f": '\bw.?f\b'
I'm (obviously) not well-versed in regular expressions at the moment, but would appreciate any pointers someone may have to handle numeric characters in the way I need to - thanks!
Code in question:
/**
*
* #param searchString
* #param strToBeSearched
* #return
*/
public boolean findString(String searchString, String strToBeSearched) {
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(wildcardToRegex(searchString));
return pattern.matcher(strToBeSearched).find();
}
private String wildcardToRegex(String wildcard){
StringBuffer s = new StringBuffer(wildcard.length());
s.append("\\b");
for (int i = 0, is = wildcard.length(); i < is; i++) {
char c = wildcard.charAt(i);
switch(c) {
case '*':
s.append(".*");
break;
case '?':
s.append(".?");
break;
default:
s.append(c);
break;
}
}
s.append("\\b");
return(s.toString());
}

Answer 1

Let's assume your string to search in is
1208
The search "term" the user enters is
120
The pattern then is
\b120\b
The \b (word boundary) meta-character matches beginning and end of "words".
In our example, this can't work because 120 != 1208
The pattern has to be
\b.*120.*\b
where .* means match a variable number of characters (including null).
Solution:
either add the .*s to your wildcardToRegex(...) method to make this functionality work out-of-the-box,
or tell your users to search for *120*, because your * wildcard character does exactly the same.
This is, in fact, my preference because the user can then define whether to search for entries starting with something (search for something*), including something (*something*), ending with something (*something), or exactly something (something).