Regular expressions are nice but has anyone seen good code on performing wildcard searches on strings. I'm trying to avoid writing a function or class to do it. The LIKE operator is nice but only returns a boolean. I'm looking for the string position where the wildcard is true.

Or, does anyone know how to do convert the following pattern using regular expressions and return string position and length of result:

input string="crazy code"
pattern="*zy*c?d"

Thanks.