# Search by Perl regular expression (pcre)
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-by-perl-regular-expression-pcre/46382
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [April 5, 2016, 11:06am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-by-perl-regular-expression-pcre/46382 "2016-04-05T11:06:32Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@vacmf](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/vacmf)
#### Post date: [April 5, 2016, 11:06am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-by-perl-regular-expression-pcre/46382/1 "2016-04-05T11:06:32Z")
Hello all,
I did some research and found plenty of topic about regular expressions but nothing specifically to PCRE. Hope to get some hint here.
In short I'm periodically provided with a list of Perl Compatible Regular Expressions to match against the data indexed in elasticsearch. I have to do it continuously as new data is added as well as on the whole data set when I receive new regular expressions.
Basically it should be matter of changing or extending search engine to support PCRE but as said I didn't find much around.
Do you know of any plugin, project or someone had a similar problem?
Any help or suggestion is very much appreciated.
lorenzo
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### Author:  [@warkolm](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/warkolm)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2016, 1:02am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-by-perl-regular-expression-pcre/46382/2 "2016-04-07T01:02:24Z")
I haven't seen anything that can do this, it'd probably be something you need to build.
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 5, 2017, 11:01pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-by-perl-regular-expression-pcre/46382/3 "2017-07-05T23:01:42Z")