# How to know which field (fields) is matched and do the custom highlighting?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-know-which-field-fields-is-matched-and-do-the-custom-highlighting/3514
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [November 4, 2010, 1:30am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-know-which-field-fields-is-matched-and-do-the-custom-highlighting/3514 "2010-11-04T01:30:17Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Chunlei\_Wu](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Chunlei_Wu)
#### Post date: [November 4, 2010, 1:30am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-know-which-field-fields-is-matched-and-do-the-custom-highlighting/3514/1 "2010-11-04T01:30:17Z")
Hi,
```
My JSON document to be indexed has dozens of fields:
```
{
"field1": "foo",
"field2": ["bar1", "bar2", "bar3"],
"field3": ["foo", "foo2"],
"field4": "adskj akfjoa asdfja foo adbja ...",
... ...
}
I can index them in ES without a problem. My query is mostly looking
for matches on any fields (e.g., just a string query of "foo").
My question is to know which fields are matched (like "field1",
"field3" and "field4" for a query of "foo")? I can pass all my fields
for highlighting, and that will return matched fields with highlighted
snippets and the rest of fields with "[]". Because I have large amount
of fields, that will make the returned query result quite big. So I am
wondering if there is other better way to do that or any way to simply
remove the unmatched fields from "highlight".
My eventual purpose is to get a custom highlighting like this (for a
query "foo"):
{
...
"highlight": {"field1": ["_foo_"],
"field3": ["_foo_, foo2"],
"field4": ["adskj akfjoa asdfja _foo_
adbja"],
},
...
}
Basically, for a field with an array of values (i.e., "field3"), I
need to highlight matches under the context of other values.
Thanks a lot.
Chunlei
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 4:17am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-know-which-field-fields-is-matched-and-do-the-custom-highlighting/3514/2 "2017-07-06T04:17:12Z")