# Wildcard

The wildcard symbol is a star and connotes the same meaning as a wildcard in a regular expression or a card game. A typical RuleBuilder context is a wildcard in either the name or one of the states of a molecular component. If a component is not formally named, it defaults to the name of "wildcard", meaning that any other component that is a structural match will be of the same type. Similarly, states that are not set also default to wildcard status meaning that a other components with a structural match are agnostic as to the the attribute of state.