A particular case of elasticsearch substring query

Question

I want to search for a substring in a document column using elasticsearch. The document column contains strings exactly 255 characters long. In that column I want to search occurrences of a substring within a specified position. For e.g. I want to search the substring "ABC" that lies at character position 5-7 of the string. Thus xxxxABCxxxxx... is a valid answer but xxABCxxxxx... is NOT (consider that index starts from 1).

The wildcard query can search substrings but not in a specified fixed position.

{
    "query": {
        "wildcard": {
           "String Name": {
              "value": "*ABC*"
           }
        }
    }
}

How do I formulate this query in python?

Answer 1

Could you use the regexp filter to achieve this?

from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch

es = Elasticsearch(...)
resp = es.search(
    index="index-name",
    body={
        "query": {
            "regexp": {
                "String Name": {
                    "value": "^.{4}ABC"
                }
            }
        }
    }
)
print(resp)

You'll have to enable search.allow_expensive_queries to enable usage of the regexp filter.

<disclosure: I'm maintainer of the Python Elasticsearch clients and employed by Elastic>