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JavaScript

Jesse Thompson
Jesse Thompson
10,684 Points
Posted by Jesse Thompson
Jesse Thompson
10,684 Points

Difficulty making wildcard search in mongodb using react/express

I am having an issue with syntax for my wildcard username search for an app I am building.

So I have a fetch request on the client side. It sends the body and in body I have a variable under searchusers which is the string put into the search input.

Now for some reason if I type User.find({username: /a/ } it will return every user with a username containing a. But if the variable is equal to usersearch = '/' + 'a' + '/' and I instead type what is below it does not work.

What is the correct way to write a mongodb wildcard query using a variable?

 router.post('/searchusers', (req, res, next) => {
    console.log(req.body);
    let usersearch = '/' + req.body.searchusers + '/';
    console.log(usersearch);
    User.find({username: usersearch}, function(err, result) {
        if (err) throw err;
        console.log(result)

    });
});

1 Answer

Brendan Whiting
seal-mask
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree seal-36
Brendan Whiting
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 84,738 Points
Brendan Whiting
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree seal-36
Brendan Whiting
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 84,738 Points

Not 100% sure, but I think the issue is that regular expressions in JavaScript aren't wrapped in quotes, they're wrapped in just slashes. So I think what you want to do is use the RegExp constructor and pass in the string variable.

let usersearch = new RegExp(req.body.searchusers);
Jesse Thompson
Jesse Thompson
10,684 Points
Jesse Thompson
Jesse Thompson
10,684 Points

worked perfectly. Thankyou for clearing up this syntax problem very quickly for me.