Humorous timing for me as I made a (bad) joke the other day about such a piece of software: "I created an algorithm to turn a selection of strings into a regula

Humorous timing for me as I made a (bad) joke the other day about such a piece of software: "I created an algorithm to turn a selection of strings into a regular expression but it just keeps returning (dot asterisk)" In other news, how do you actually render an asterisk on HN?