Jira uses the Lucene search engine and Jira documentation says leading wildcards like *something are not supported. But apparently Lucene could do this, see the the excerpt from the Lucene Wiki
Does anybody know if I could configure Lucene this way in a Jira installation?
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What wildcard search support is available from Lucene?
Lucene supports wild card queries which allow you to perform searches such as book*, which will find documents containing terms such as book, bookstore, booklet, etc. Lucene refers to this type of a query as a 'prefix query'.
Lucene also supports wild card queries which allow you to place a wild card in the middle of the query term. For instance, you could make searches like: mi*pelling. That will match both misspelling, which is the correct way to spell this word, as well as mispelling, which is a common spelling mistake.
Another wild card character that you can use is '?', a question mark. The ? will match a single character. This allows you to perform queries such as Bra?il. Such a query will match both Brasil and Brazil. Lucene refers to this type of a query as a 'wildcard query'.
Leading wildcards (e.g. *ook) are not supported by the QueryParser by default. As of Lucene 2.1, they can be enabled by calling <tt class="backtick">QueryParser.setAllowLeadingWildcard( true )</tt>. Note that this can be an expensive operation: it requires scanning the list of tokens in the index in its entirety to look for those that match the pattern.
