Characters entered in this field will be added to any processed article numbers before the pattern matching is performed, that means before the article number is being compared with the existing article numbers. Like this you can add missing characters to text strings, which presumably could be article numbers. Adding characters is solely done for the purpose of pattern matching. The added characters are neither stored on the pages nor in the database.
The contents of article numbers themselves will not be changed. Please be aware of the comments about wildcards at the beginning of this chapter.