MongoDB: Is it possible to make a case-insensitive query?

Question

Example:

> db.stuff.save({\"foo\":\"bar\"});

> db.stuff.find({\"foo\":\"bar\"}).count();
1
> db.stuff.find({\"foo\":\"BAR\"}).count();
0


        

Answer 1

Keep in mind that the previous example:

db.stuff.find( { foo: /bar/i } );

will cause every entries containing bar to match the query ( bar1, barxyz, openbar ), it could be very dangerous for a username search on a auth function ...

You may need to make it match only the search term by using the appropriate regexp syntax as:

db.stuff.find( { foo: /^bar$/i } );

See http://www.regular-expressions.info/ for syntax help on regular expressions

Answer 2

I'm surprised nobody has warned about the risk of regex injection by using /^bar$/i if bar is a password or an account id search. (I.e. bar => .*@myhackeddomain.com e.g., so here comes my bet: use \Q \E regex special chars! provided in PERL

db.stuff.find( { foo: /^\Qbar\E$/i } );

You should escape bar variable \ chars with \\ to avoid \E exploit again when e.g. bar = '\E.*@myhackeddomain.com\Q'

Another option is to use a regex escape char strategy like the one described here Javascript equivalent of Perl's \Q ... \E or quotemeta()

Answer 3

Using Mongoose this worked for me:

var find = function(username, next){
    User.find({'username': {$regex: new RegExp('^' + username, 'i')}}, function(err, res){
        if(err) throw err;
        next(null, res);
    });
}

Answer 4

If you need to create the regexp from a variable, this is a much better way to do it: https://stackoverflow.com/a/10728069/309514

You can then do something like:

var string = "SomeStringToFind";
var regex = new RegExp(["^", string, "$"].join(""), "i");
// Creates a regex of: /^SomeStringToFind$/i
db.stuff.find( { foo: regex } );

This has the benefit be being more programmatic or you can get a performance boost by compiling it ahead of time if you're reusing it a lot.

Answer 5

TL;DR

Correct way to do this in mongo

Do not Use RegExp

Go natural And use mongodb's inbuilt indexing , search

Step 1 :

db.articles.insert(
   [
     { _id: 1, subject: "coffee", author: "xyz", views: 50 },
     { _id: 2, subject: "Coffee Shopping", author: "efg", views: 5 },
     { _id: 3, subject: "Baking a cake", author: "abc", views: 90  },
     { _id: 4, subject: "baking", author: "xyz", views: 100 },
     { _id: 5, subject: "Café Con Leche", author: "abc", views: 200 },
     { _id: 6, subject: "Сырники", author: "jkl", views: 80 },
     { _id: 7, subject: "coffee and cream", author: "efg", views: 10 },
     { _id: 8, subject: "Cafe con Leche", author: "xyz", views: 10 }
   ]
)
 

Step 2 :

Need to create index on whichever TEXT field you want to search , without indexing query will be extremely slow

db.articles.createIndex( { subject: "text" } )

step 3 :

db.articles.find( { $text: { $search: "coffee",$caseSensitive :true } } )  //FOR SENSITIVITY
db.articles.find( { $text: { $search: "coffee",$caseSensitive :false } } ) //FOR INSENSITIVITY


 

Answer 6

Use RegExp, In case if any other options do not work for you, RegExp is a good option. It makes the string case insensitive.

var username = new RegExp("^" + "John" + "$", "i");;

use username in queries, and then its done.

I hope it will work for you too. All the Best.