I was afraid that would be the answer but was thinking positive.

OK one for the wish list then – While in the search mode you can hold the “whatever” key down an “*” wildcard appears and can be used to represent any number of characters. If you hold the “other whatever” key a “?” appears and represents one wildcard character.

Would this be hard, easy or impossible to code?

If easy I might try, I could not handle anything but easy.