How to search query by field with exact match in Elasticsearch

user_3759717 0
Viewed 1390

I'm trying to search for a document, by field value. The field is of type String that was defined in the index like this:

"field" : { 
        "type" : "string"
 }

There are no other settings to the index but the mappings.

I tried various queries to try to find documents with field="test", and every time I get no results or results that contain that substring "test". I want the document where "field" matches "test" exactly.

I tried match, match_phrase, term and query_string, none of which seems to work as I want.

elasticsearch-dsl elasticsearch
2 Answers

You need to use term query with keyword like this

{
   "query" : {
      "term" : {
         "field.keyword" : "test"
      }
   }
}

hope this helps.

user_10217960

It seems that you are on an Elasticsearch version prior to version 6, which still supported the String type. More recent version of Elasticsearch replaced the string field-type with types keyword and text to make it easier to support the two use-cases of exact-match and full-text search use cases.

You need to change your mapping to support exact-match search as follows:

{
  "field": {
    "type" "string",
    "index": "not_analyzed"
  }
}

As you cannot change an existing mapping, you need to do that change on a new index and get everything re-indexed.

If you are on Elasticsearch version 6+ simply use a field of type keyword for exact-match searches. By default string fields get mapped to a multi-field made of of 2 fields:

  • one of type text (for full-text search), referenced by
  • one of type keyword (for exact match search), referenced by .keyword

Hereby an interesting blog post about that topic: Strings are dead, long live strings!

user_57404140
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