Using Regex in mongodb

Question

I'm trying to use regular expressions in my mongodb queries. According the documentation I can run a regular expression in my query like this :

db.customers.find( { name : /^foo.bar/ } );

But is there a way to store a regex in the document and retreive the documents where the regex matches a supplied string ?

Example document :

{ _id : SomeID , matcher : "/^foo.bar/" }

Query (in my dreams).

db.customers.find( { matcher : { $matches : "foozbar" } );

Howmany number of rows are there in your collection? I think this is not working with large number of row in collection. — Maulik Vora
– Maulik Vora, Commented Jul 25, 2012 at 12:19

Vasiliy Faronov · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-04 19:03:10Z

6

Yes, you can use arbitrary JavaScript in queries.

> db.customers.insert({_id: 9, matcher: '^foo.bar'})
> db.customers.insert({_id: 318, matcher: '^bar.qux'})
> db.customers.insert({_id: 44, matcher: '^foo[a-z]+r'})
> db.customers.find(function() {
...     return RegExp(this.matcher).test('foozbar');
... })
{ "_id" : 9, "matcher" : "^foo.bar" }
{ "_id" : 44, "matcher" : "^foo[a-z]+r" }

answered Oct 4, 2011 at 19:03

Vasiliy Faronov

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3 Comments

Maulik Vora Over a year ago

@Vasiliy-foronov This is working good for small number of rows in collection. But if I have 200k rows in collection, it is not working. I think there is a problem of timeout. Let me your suggestion.

Vasiliy Faronov Over a year ago

@MaulikVora My answer runs JavaScript on MongoDB, which is slow. I don’t know if there is any other way to do this. Perhaps you could go the other way around: do you really need to match against plain, unrestricted regexes?

Rahul Kumar Over a year ago

its like using $where query, it cannot use any indexing so it would be slow. I think it's as good as it gets.

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