Wildcard and prefix queries in Elasticsearch - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Wildcard and Prefix Queries in Elasticsearch

📖 Scenario: You are working with a small Elasticsearch index that stores information about books in a library. You want to find books by searching for titles that start with certain letters or contain certain patterns.

🎯 Goal: Build Elasticsearch queries using wildcard and prefix to find books by title patterns.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an Elasticsearch index called library with a title field

Write a wildcard query to find titles containing a specific pattern

Write a prefix query to find titles starting with a specific prefix

Print the JSON query objects for both queries

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Searching books, products, or documents by partial text matches is common in search engines and apps.

💼 Career

Knowing how to write wildcard and prefix queries helps you build flexible search features in Elasticsearch for many real-world applications.

1

Create the Elasticsearch index mapping

Create a JSON object called library_index with a mappings field that defines a title field of type text.

Elasticsearch

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Define library_index as a dictionary with mappings and properties for title.

2

Create a wildcard query for titles containing 'magic'

Create a JSON object called wildcard_query that uses a wildcard query on the title field with the value *magic*.

Elasticsearch

library_index = {
    "mappings": {
        "properties": {
            "title": {"type": "text"}
        }
    }
}
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the wildcard query with title and value *magic*.

3

Create a prefix query for titles starting with 'harry'

Create a JSON object called prefix_query that uses a prefix query on the title field with the value harry.

Elasticsearch

library_index = {
    "mappings": {
        "properties": {
            "title": {"type": "text"}
        }
    }
}
wildcard_query = {
    "query": {
        "wildcard": {
            "title": "*magic*"
        }
    }
}
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the prefix query with title and value harry.

4

Print both queries

Write two print statements to display the wildcard_query and prefix_query JSON objects.

Elasticsearch

library_index = {
    "mappings": {
        "properties": {
            "title": {"type": "text"}
        }
    }
}
wildcard_query = {
    "query": {
        "wildcard": {
            "title": "*magic*"
        }
    }
}
prefix_query = {
    "query": {
        "prefix": {
            "title": "harry"
        }
    }
}
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(wildcard_query) and print(prefix_query).