# Regex over \_uid field **URL:** \ **Category:** Elasticsearch\ **Created:** [April 21, 2017, 2:24pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/regex-over--uid-field/83222 "2017-04-21T14:24:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![BBerastegui](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/bberastegui/32/17578_2.png) [@BBerastegui](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/BBerastegui)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 2:24pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/regex-over--uid-field/83222/1 "2017-04-21T14:24:53Z")
Hi all ! I was using a previous version of ES in order to apply regexp on an \_uid field by using the following query (\_trying to get _id fields greater than 26 characters_): > { "query": { "bool": { "must": [{ "regexp": { "\_uid": { "value": "mydoctype..{26,}" } } }] } } } And this was working as expected. Unfortunately, after upgrading to the latest version of ES, I got the following error when running the same search: > TransportError(400, u'search\_phase\_execution\_exception', u'Can only use regexp queries on keyword and text fields - not on [\_uid] which is of type [\_uid]') Is the regexp support over meta fields no longer supported? Is there any other way of doing this that I might be missing? Thanks in advance for your time ! Edit: For helping and clarification for the next person that lands here, the answer was given here: [\_uid field doesn't support regexes · Issue #24247 · elastic/elasticsearch · GitHub](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/24247#issuecomment-296212819) And the summary is that **no, regexp on \_uid is not supported anymore** , and the reason is: > We plan on switching `_uid` to a more compact (binary) representation in the future, which will make the uid field incompatible with regexp, prefix or wildcard queries. So I don't think we should allow this again. Cheers. ---
**Author:** ![nik9000](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/nik9000/32/44947_2.png) [@nik9000](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/nik9000)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 2:50pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/regex-over--uid-field/83222/2 "2017-04-21T14:50:25Z")
> [@BBerastegui](#): > > And this was working as expected. It may have worked but I don't think it worked "as expected". The `script.engine.groovy.inline.update` setting doesn't have anything to do with the `regexp` query. Unless you really need to turn on inline groovy scripting I'd turn it off because it is a security nightmare. I think your issue is that `_uid` changed to not allow those kinds of queries. I opened an issue to discuss it: > > > I'm opening this discuss issue in response to a forum \[post\](https://discuss.ela…stic.co/t/regex-over--uid-field/83222). > > It looks like you used to be able to run a regex query on \`\_uid\` but you can't anymore. Do we want to allow it again? I don't know that we'll want to support those queries for `_uid`, but that'll be settled in the issue. You should be able to work around the issue using a script query and the doc values storage for `_uid` but it'll be much slower because it won't be able to use the index. ---
**Author:** ![BBerastegui](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/bberastegui/32/17578_2.png) [@BBerastegui](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/BBerastegui)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 3:46pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/regex-over--uid-field/83222/3 "2017-04-21T15:46:07Z")
Hi ! I messed up the question by adding the groovy thing, totally true that it was not related to that at all, I already edited the question for the sake of clarity 🙂 I'll follow up that discussion then, as I see it's no longer possible to do what I was doing before ! Thanks for your reply ! ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2017, 3:47pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/regex-over--uid-field/83222/4 "2017-05-19T15:47:28Z")
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