Matching table values with a wildcard?

As I understand it, the code below searches in a table for an item called, "1*item.itemCellUranDepleted@0" and then turns the function "hasEmptyCell()" to true. My question is, how do I search for all items that start with "1*item.itemCellUranDepleted@" and still make the function true?

For example "1*item.itemCellUranDepleted@1231231", "1*item.itemCellUranDepleted@2342", etc. would all make the function true not just "1*item.itemCellUranDepleted@0"

os.loadAPI("/rom/apis/sensors")
while true do
local function hasEmptyCell()
		local controllerSide, sensor, probes = sensors.getController(), "Sensor", "InventoryContent"
		for _, target in pairs( sensors.getAvailableTargetsforProbe( controllerSide, sensor, probes ) ) do
				local data = sensors.getSensorReadingAsDict( controllerSide, sensor, "Nuclear Reactor,-426,64,-715", probes )
				for i=1, table.maxn(data) do
						if data[i] == "1*item.itemCellUranDepleted@0" then
								return true
						end
				end
		end
		return false
end
if hasEmptyCell() then found = true else found = false end
print( found )
if found == true then
rs.setOutput("front", false) else
rs.setOutput("front", true)
end
sleep(1)
end

Maybe use gmatch and patterns?

Personally I'd just use string.sub() for this;

if data[i]:sub(1, 28) == "1*item.itemCellUranDepleted@" then

This gets only the first 28 characters of data, ignoring the rest of it.This article explains more about it, along with many other operations you can perform on strings.

I have always used table.concat to find values for example

return not not table.concat(data,","):find("1*item.itemCellUranDepleted@")