Symbols for General Number and General Letter?

I'm trying to make an excel formula that generalizes product names based on their format. So the general format would be XYZ08/T13. I know a ? is equal to a general letter, but is their a symbo that specifically means letter or number. I'm running into problems using the ? because the formula ends up identifying additional items that are not products as products. Thanks.

I think you need to be specific about what you are trying to achieve...

please give examples of what you are trying to do.

To be more specific here are the symbols I am working with.

The first symbol is like this ABC08/A10XY. The second symbol is like 1234/0.0Y(01/01/08)XY.

The problem is the number of letters and numbers can change with the first in second symbols. For example the first symbol could be AAAA10/B10XYZ, and the second symbol could be ABCZ.2.2(02/04/08)XY.

I'm trying to write a formula that differentiates between the first and second symbols as they represent different products. The main differentiator between the two is that the second symbol contains a full date and has more / than the first symbol, but I am having trouble writing a formula that can both include the variability in the naming of the two symbols and still differentiate between the two.

Can you describe, in words, what exactly the formula should do then?

I have been trying to use a count if fomrula, but I'm not sure if there is a beter way.

The formula would return 1 if the symbol did not meet the specificed criteria and reutrn a different number if it did meet the criteria. I'm really just looking for ways to have a formula differentiate between two symbols that are dynamic and somewhat overlaping.

Will this work?

=--ISNUMBER(SEARCH("("&REPT("?",8)&")",A1))

This formula looks in A1 for a opening parenthesis, 8 characters (which it assumes is a date in the format "dd/mm/yy") and a closing parenthesis. If it finds that, it returns a 1, else it returns a 0.