Meteor & mongoDB LIKE query

Question

Im trying to produce a query from what the user has searched for. I have an array of strings which i just want to send through in the mongoDB selector, my problem is with the /text/ syntax, it works perfectly from the mongoDB console like this:

Items.find({ $or: [{name: /doc/}, {tags: /doc/}, {name: /test/}, {tags: /test/}] });

But i cannot manage to write the same syntax in javascript, i've tried several version.

var mongoDbArr = [];
  searchArray.forEach(function(text) {
    mongoDbArr.push({name: /text/});
    mongoDbArr.push({tags: /text/});
  });
  return Items.find({ $or: mongoDbArr});

But it only searches for "text" and not whats in the variable. And like this:

var mongoDbArr = [];
  searchArray.forEach(function(text) {
    mongoDbArr.push({name: "/" + text + "/"});
    mongoDbArr.push({tags: "/" + text + "/"});
  });
  return Items.find({ $or: mongoDbArr});

But that doesn't give me any results back. What am i missing?

Answer 1

You have to build your regular expressions with javascript:

var mongoDbArr = [];
searchArray.forEach(function(text) {
    mongoDbArr.push({name: new RegExp(text)});
    mongoDbArr.push({tags: new RegExp(text,"i")});
});

return Items.find({ $or: mongoDbArr});

Or use a regular expressions query with mongodb:

mongoDbArr.push({name: { $regex : text, $options:"i" } });
mongoDbArr.push({tags: { $regex : text, $options:"i" } });

To escape special characters you can do this before you use text (from JQuery UI's source)

text = text.replace(/[\-\[\]{}()*+?.,\\\^$|#\s]/g, "\\$&");