# Substring search **URL:** \ **Category:** Elasticsearch\ **Created:** [March 25, 2012, 8:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/substring-search/7117 "2012-03-25T20:36:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![be\_the\_water](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/be_the_water/32/2944_2.png) [@be\_the\_water](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/be_the_water)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2012, 8:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/substring-search/7117/1 "2012-03-25T20:36:09Z")
Does Elasticsearch support (or what are the options for) substring search? Example "ball" or "bal" in basketball? Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![Thomas\_Peuss](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/22d042/32.png) [@Thomas\_Peuss](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Thomas_Peuss)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2012, 6:26am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/substring-search/7117/2 "2012-03-26T06:26:07Z")
Hi Anonymous! Am Sonntag, 25. März 2012 22:36:09 UTC+2 schrieb be.the.water: > Does Elasticsearch support (or what are the options for) substring > search? > > Example "ball" or "bal" in basketball? You have two options: 1. Use ngrams through the ngram token filter: [Elasticsearch Platform — Find real-time answers at scale | Elastic](http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/index-modules/analysis/ngram-tokenfilter.html). See Wikipedia for details: [n-gram - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram) 2. Use the compound token filter [Elasticsearch Platform — Find real-time answers at scale | Elastic](http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/index-modules/analysis/compound-word-tokenfilter.html) (which I have contributed to Lucene btw.) The ngrams are useful if you cannot provide a dictionary because you don't know what type of documents you have to index. The downside is that they use a lot of space in your indices. So you need to be careful here. CU Thomas ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 3:34am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/substring-search/7117/3 "2017-07-06T03:34:51Z")