Enable regex/smart search via data-* HTML ?

vascov

Is is possible to enable regex/smart search below ?

        <table id="metrics-diffset"
            class="table table-striped"
            data-toggle="table"
            data-pagination="true"
            data-show-columns="true"
            data-search="true"
        >

This is part of an ASP.NET MVC app I just inherited.
I need to enable regex/smart search for this. I saw an example here (https://datatables.net/examples/api/regex.html) but was wondering if there's a way to do it in <td> directly.

Somehow related, is there a way to make it negative, i.e., filter everything NOT matching a filter ?