# Search Query for excluding a combination of characters and numbers
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-query-for-excluding-a-combination-of-characters-and-numbers/146914
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [August 31, 2018, 8:20pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-query-for-excluding-a-combination-of-characters-and-numbers/146914 "2018-08-31T20:20:05Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@vshankara](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/vshankara)
#### Post date: [August 31, 2018, 8:20pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-query-for-excluding-a-combination-of-characters-and-numbers/146914/1 "2018-08-31T20:20:05Z")
I have a requirement to query for user information but need to exclude a combination of alphabatical characters and numbers. I could easily do this in a regex but not sure on lucene syntax
For eg: need to exclude abc1234 or zzz2345 but include something like testuser or tes12ab
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### Author:  [@vshankara](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/vshankara)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2018, 1:31am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-query-for-excluding-a-combination-of-characters-and-numbers/146914/2 "2018-09-04T01:31:20Z")
Can somebody please help me with this...Thanks
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### Author:  [@insomniac](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/insomniac)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2018, 4:10am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-query-for-excluding-a-combination-of-characters-and-numbers/146914/3 "2018-09-04T04:10:31Z")
The search bar does support regex.
[https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/6.3/query-dsl-query-string-query.html#query-string-syntax](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/6.3/query-dsl-query-string-query.html#query-string-syntax)
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### Author:  [@vshankara](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/vshankara)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2018, 7:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-query-for-excluding-a-combination-of-characters-and-numbers/146914/4 "2018-09-04T19:15:13Z")
Thank you. I missed seeing the regex patterns, thanks for pointing out to me. I was able to resolve this using the pattern "UserID:/[^0-9]+/" which basically excludes anything with 1 or more numbers
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2018, 7:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-query-for-excluding-a-combination-of-characters-and-numbers/146914/5 "2018-10-02T19:15:23Z")
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