G'day p_jacobson,

Welcome to the Monastery.

The following code meets all of your expectations. It requires Perl v5.14 for the non-destructive transliteration and substitutions.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use v5.14;
use warnings;
use constant OLD => 1;

my @data = (
    [qw{1 ABFD-1234 AAA}],
    [qw{2 ABFD-178G BBB}],
    [qw{3 F2HB-9401 AAA}],
    [qw{4 ZDDR-00W5 DDD}],
    [qw{5 D7*D-48*6 EEE}],
);

my @wild_cards = qw{940 ABFD-1 ABFD1 D7RD DD482};

for my $search (@wild_cards) {
    say $search;
    my $re = qr{@{[$search
        =~ y/-//dr
        =~ s//-?/gr
        =~ s/([A-Z0-9])/(?:$1|\\*)/gr
    ]}};

    for my $datum (@data) {
        say "@$datum" if $datum->[OLD] =~ $re;
    }
}
[download]

Output:

940
3 F2HB-9401 AAA
ABFD-1
1 ABFD-1234 AAA
2 ABFD-178G BBB
ABFD1
1 ABFD-1234 AAA
2 ABFD-178G BBB
D7RD
5 D7*D-48*6 EEE
DD482
5 D7*D-48*6 EEE
[download]