Wildcard Search with ArangoSearch

    You can use the function for this search technique to find strings that start with, contain or end with a certain substring, but it can do more than that. You can place the special characters _ and % as wildcards for single or zero-or-more characters in the search string to match multiple partial strings.

    The ArangoSearch LIKE() function is backed by View indexes. In contrast, the cannot utilize any sort of index. Another difference is that the ArangoSearch variant does not accept a third argument to make matching case-insensitive. You can control this via Analyzers instead, also see Case-insensitive Search with ArangoSearch. Which of the two equally named functions is used is determined by the context. It is the ArangoSearch variant in SEARCH operations and the String variant everywhere else.

    • _: A single arbitrary character
    • %: Zero, one or many arbitrary characters
    • \\_: A literal underscore
    • \\%: A literal percent sign

    Literal backlashes require different amounts of escaping depending on the context:

    • \\ in bind variables (JSON view mode) and queries in the Web UI
    • \\ in bind variables in arangosh
    • in queries in arangosh
    • Double the amount compared to arangosh in shells that use backslashes for escaping (\\\\ in bind variables and \\\\\\\\ in queries)

    Wildcard Search Examples

    Dataset: IMDB movie dataset

    AQL queries:

    Match all titles that starts with The Matr using LIKE(), where _ stands for a single wildcard character and % for an arbitrary amount:

    1. FOR doc IN imdb
    2.   SEARCH ANALYZER(LIKE(doc.title, "The Matr%"), "identity")

    You can achieve the same with the STARTS_WITH() function:

    Match all titles that contain Mat using LIKE():

    1. FOR doc IN imdb
    3.   RETURN doc.title

    Match all titles that have an H as first letter, followed by two arbitrary characters, followed by ry and any amount of characters after that. It will match titles starting with Harry and Henry:

    1. FOR doc IN imdb
    2.   SEARCH ANALYZER(LIKE(doc.title, "H__ry%"), "identity")
    3.   RETURN doc.title

    Use a bind parameter as input, but escape the characters with special meaning and perform a contains-style search by prepending and appending a percent sign:

    Bind parameters:

      The query constructs the wildcard string %y\\_% and will match Cry_Wolf.