Documentation

Regular expressions

InfluxDB 3 Core is in Public Alpha

InfluxDB 3 Core is in public alpha and available for testing and feedback, but is not meant for production use. Both the product and this documentation are works in progress. We welcome and encourage your input about your experience with the alpha and invite you to join our public channels for updates and to share feedback.

Alpha expectations and recommendations

Regular expressions are a sequence of characters used to identify patterns in identifiers and string values. InfluxQL supports regular expressions in the following operations:

Query performance

Regular expression comparisons are more computationally intensive than exact string comparisons. Queries with regular expressions are not as performant as those without.

Regular expression syntax

InfluxQL Regular expressions are surrounded by / characters and use the Go regular expression syntax.

/regular_expression/

Regular expression flags

Regular expression flags modify the pattern-matching behavior of the expression. InfluxQL supports the following regular expression flags:

FlagDescription
icase-insensitive
mmulti-line mode: ^ and $ match begin/end line in addition to begin/end text
slet . match \n
Uungreedy: swap meaning of x* and x*?, x+ and x+?, etc.

Include regular expression flags at the beginning of your regular expression pattern enclosed in parentheses (()) and preceded by a question mark (?).

/(?iU)foo*/

Regular expression operators

InfluxQL provides the following regular expression operators that test if a string operand matches a regular expression:

  • =~: Returns true if the string matches the regular expression
  • !~: Returns true if the string does not match the regular expression

InfluxQL regular expression operators are used to test string column values in the WHERE clause.

Regular expression examples

The examples below use the following sample data sets:

Use a regular expression to specify field keys and tag keys in the SELECT clause

Use a regular expression to specify measurements in the FROM clause

Use a regular expression to specify tag values in the WHERE clause

Use a regular expression to specify a tag with no value in the WHERE clause

Use a regular expression to specify tag keys in the GROUP BY clause


Was this page helpful?

Thank you for your feedback!


The future of Flux

Flux is going into maintenance mode. You can continue using it as you currently are without any changes to your code.

Read more

InfluxDB 3 Open Source Now in Public Alpha

InfluxDB 3 Open Source is now available for alpha testing, licensed under MIT or Apache 2 licensing.

We are releasing two products as part of the alpha.

InfluxDB 3 Core, is our new open source product. It is a recent-data engine for time series and event data. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise is a commercial version that builds on Core’s foundation, adding historical query capability, read replicas, high availability, scalability, and fine-grained security.

For more information on how to get started, check out: