# While searching in kibana, can i use substring on a field?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/while-searching-in-kibana-can-i-use-substring-on-a-field/157006>\
**Category:** Kibana\
**Created:** [November 16, 2018, 8:17am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/while-searching-in-kibana-can-i-use-substring-on-a-field/157006 "2018-11-16T08:17:45Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Rajt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Rajt](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Rajt)\
**Post date:** [November 16, 2018, 8:17am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/while-searching-in-kibana-can-i-use-substring-on-a-field/157006/1 "2018-11-16T08:17:45Z")

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I have a field called client\_label.

And i want to group the values by first 4 characters of the results.

Eg: client\_label values are "jdbc-8.0", "jdbc-8.1","MCXX-9.0", "Logs-2.0", "Logs-2.1" and so on.....

So, i want a aggregate result as follows for the query : substring(client\_label, 1,4) \*  
client\_label | count  
jdbc | 2  
MCXX | 1  
Logs | 2

Do we have any such function?

Thanks,  
Raj

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**Author:** ![rashmi](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/rashmi/32/16391_2.png) [@rashmi](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/rashmi)\
**Post date:** [November 16, 2018, 6:39pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/while-searching-in-kibana-can-i-use-substring-on-a-field/157006/2 "2018-11-16T18:39:31Z")

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I think the answer is, it depends. In any place you would be using Painless, for example, in Kibana's scripted fields, you can use Regex to do substring matches on a field-value.

See here for an example: [Substring in painless](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/substring-in-painless/88660/3)

hope it helps  
Rashmi

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [December 14, 2018, 6:39pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/while-searching-in-kibana-can-i-use-substring-on-a-field/157006/3 "2018-12-14T18:39:39Z")

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