I was looking for a way to solve this without generating a regex. This is the best I have found so far. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; # https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=11156323
use warnings;

my %data = map { (split)[1] => $_ } <DATA>;

for my $searchfor ( qw( 940 ABFD-1 ABFD1 D7RD DD482 ) )
  {
  print "\n$searchfor\n";
  print  ' ' x 8, $data{$_} for grep match($searchfor, $_), sort keys 
+%data;
  }

sub match
  {
  use feature 'bitwise';
  my ($match, $to) = map tr/*-/\0/dr, @_;
  my $length = length $match;
  return $to =~ /(?=(.{$length}))
    (??{ ($match ^. $1) =~ tr!0-9A-Z\0!!c ? '(*FAIL)' : '(*ACCEPT)' })
+/gx;
  }

__DATA__
1   ABFD-1234  AAA
2   ABFD-178G  BBB
3   F2HB-9401  AAA
4   ZDDR-00W5  DDD
5   D7*D-48*6  EEE

[download]

In reply to Re: Partial Searches Against Multiple Wildcards by tybalt89
in thread Partial Searches Against Multiple Wildcards by p_jacobson

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