mongodb find by multiple array items

Question

If I have a record like this;

{
  "text": "text goes here",
  "words": ["text", "goes", "here"]
}

How can I match multiple words from it in MongoDB? When matching a single word I can do this;

db.find({ words: "text" })

But when I try this for multiple words, it doesn't work;

db.find({ words: ["text", "here"] })

I'm guessing that by using an array, it tries to match the entire array against the one in the record, rather than matching the individual contents.

AbdelHady · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-23 17:30:57Z

243

Depends on whether you're trying to find documents where words contains both elements (text and here) using $all:

db.things.find({ words: { $all: ["text", "here"] }});

or either of them (text or here) using $in:

db.things.find({ words: { $in: ["text", "here"] }});

edited May 23, 2016 at 17:30

AbdelHady

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answered Nov 16, 2011 at 1:32

user24359

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5 Comments

jbnunn Over a year ago

This helped me too, I needed it to find an object ID in an array, and where something like $in: [ ObjectId("4f9f2c336b810d0cf0000017") ] failed, $in: [ "4f9f2c336b810d0cf0000017" ] worked

Vivek Bajpai Over a year ago

you can also find another way to do this in mangodb support page docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/indexes/#indexes-on-sub-documents and docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/indexes/#multikey-indexes

Rohit Nair Over a year ago

Is this better than looping the array and performing single find()?

Milan Over a year ago

@RohitNair, It's clear to read as well as faster when doc size is big.

Time Killer Over a year ago

db.things.find({ words: { $elemMatch: { $in: ["text","here"] }})

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