# How do I make dashes insignificant in a kibana search
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-i-make-dashes-insignificant-in-a-kibana-search/1674
**Category:** Kibana
**Created:** [June 1, 2015, 11:54pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-i-make-dashes-insignificant-in-a-kibana-search/1674 "2015-06-01T23:54:41Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Jeff\_Silverman](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Jeff_Silverman)
#### Post date: [June 1, 2015, 11:54pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-i-make-dashes-insignificant-in-a-kibana-search/1674/1 "2015-06-01T23:54:41Z")
I am logging messages that contain a UUID. When I do a search on a UUID, for example, fcaaec62-d9c5-4484-bccd-1c7b0982d1bc, there is a match on any document that contains the strings 4484 or bccd. If I search on fcaaec62 then I get a single document, so I suppose I have a good work around. However, I'd really like to make a search where the dashes are not significant. How do I do that, please?
Many thanks.
Jeff
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### Author:  [@pemontto](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/pemontto)
#### Post date: [June 2, 2015, 5:25am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-i-make-dashes-insignificant-in-a-kibana-search/1674/2 "2015-06-02T05:25:55Z")
If you won't ever have the need to search for substrings in your UUID you should look at setting the field to not\_analyzed in the Elasticsearch [mapping/index template](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/master/mapping-intro.html#_index_2). That way you can only search for the whole field, useful for unique identifiers.
Alternatively you could just wrap your query in inverted commas.
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### Author:  [@Jason\_Wee](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Jason_Wee)
#### Post date: [June 2, 2015, 6:45am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-i-make-dashes-insignificant-in-a-kibana-search/1674/3 "2015-06-02T06:45:31Z")
or you can use whitespace analyzer [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-whitespace-tokenizer.html](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-whitespace-tokenizer.html) or use the match query with double quote.
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### Author:  [@avramw](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/avramw)
#### Post date: [June 10, 2015, 6:10pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-i-make-dashes-insignificant-in-a-kibana-search/1674/4 "2015-06-10T18:10:49Z")
I'm kinda new to this but running into the same question. My problem is usually I find out that I need to set a field to "not\_analyzed" after I've put data in it and started using it. My understanding is that there's no way to change a field after the fact, right? Is there a clever way around that?
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### Author:  [@pemontto](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/pemontto)
#### Post date: [June 19, 2015, 1:13pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-i-make-dashes-insignificant-in-a-kibana-search/1674/5 "2015-06-19T13:13:59Z")
That's right, the typical answer will be to update your mapping and re-index unfortunately
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 2:17pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-i-make-dashes-insignificant-in-a-kibana-search/1674/6 "2017-07-06T14:17:48Z")