Issue with filtering documents using `match` query in Elasticsearch

Hi, I ran into an issue trying to filter documents with a

match

query. I'm trying to filter on a string field containing version number-like data - 1.2.3. So I though I could get all the "version 1.x"-related documents with

version match '1.*'

but it seems periods before the wildcard -

.*

- for some reason does not work.

version match '1.2.3'

returns documents, but

version match '1.*'

does not.. 😕 I don't see the documentation mentioning

.

being a special character in this context. Is this a bug?

The

match

operator is made for human text, and can't be used this way. A string like

1.2.3

is turned into the tokens

[1, 2, 3]

, and then matched against the text, which is also tokenized this way. So

"1.2.3" match "3.2.1"

returns true.
If you only want to search by prefix, I recommend using

string::startsWith()

, e.g.:
This will match

1.2

,

1.2.3

, etc.