# 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:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

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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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