wild card in user filters

[Peter-DG]

The help system tells me that *asdfghjk* is the same as asdfhgjk - yet I'm finding that e.g., *i3.trstatic.com* traps a lot of stuff while i3.trstatic.com doesn't trap anything. Can anyone explain. Do I need those terminal and/or initial wildcards or not?

[Ares2]

Do I need those terminal and/or initial wildcards or not?

No, execpt for a very few special cases like for example

A forward slash at the beginning and the end of a filter is a special syntax to use regular expressions, so a regular filter with those MUST have a leading and/or trailing *.

/foo/*

An Filter rule that ends with a literal | (vertical bar), e.g.

?this|bar|* to block
foo.com/x.php?this|bar|is|bla


I can't think of any other case right now and your example should definitely not require any * to work, I don't know why that could be.

[Peter-DG]

Thanks Ares2. I'll experiment some more.