DataTables.SearchOptions

DataTables search options object.

Description

The search feature built into DataTables is configurable to fine tune how a search is performed. This object describes the options that can perform that fine tuning. It is used for the search and searchCols initialisation options, plus the search() and column().search() API methods.

Using Typescript definitions, the search options type is defined as:

interface DataTable.SearchOptions {
    boundary?: boolean,
    caseInsensitive?: boolean,
    exact?: boolean,
    regex?: boolean,
    smart?: boolean
}

Please note that these properties effect the behaviour of DataTables search on the client-side. If you have server-side processing (serverSide) the search configuration is entirely the responsibility of the server-side script.

Properties

The following properties are available for the search options data object:

boundary

Start the matching from the start of a word. This can be useful for cases where you want a search term such as male to match Male but not Female. Care must also be taken when using languages where white space is not significant, for example with Chinese this option could cause only the first character in a whole paragraph to match. This option is only available when smart search is enabled.

Default value: false Since: DataTables 2.0 Example with the API:

table.search('male', {
    boundary: true
});

caseInsensitive

Indicate if case-insensitive search should be performed (true) or if the search should match on case (false).

Default value: true Since: DataTables 1.10 Example with the API:

table.search('Chief', {
    caseInsensitive: false
});

exact

This option modifies the search to perform an exact match (string based) on the values in the table - e.g. from start to end of a word, unlike the "contains" search that is used in DataTables by default. This can be particularly useful for column data search - indeed it is very unlikely you'll want to use this option on a whole row since it uses string concatenation on cached search values for performance reasons.

If this option is enabled it will override the boundary, 'smartandregex` options which are not relevant.

Default value: false Since: DataTables 2.0 Example with the API:

table.column(1).search('Allan', {
    exact: true
});

regex

Indicate if the search term should be treated as a regular expression or not. If false the input term will have any regular expression characters escaped for the regular expression that DataTables runs. Note that as of DataTables 2.0 this option is discouraged - if you wish to perform a regular expression search, pass the search term in as a RegExp object (rather than a string with a regex in it).

Typically if this option is enabled you should disable the smart option as DataTables own regex can interfere with any expression given here.

Default value: false Since: DataTables 1.10 Example with the API:

table.search('Eur.*', {
    regex: true,
    smart: false
});

smart

This option can be used to enable and disable DataTables' smart search option. With smart search enabled you can:

• Search for words in any order
• Enclose a string in double quotes to perform an exact match (just as can be done with search engines)
• Start a word with ! to do a negation search (i.e. the search will match only records that do not contain the following word).

Default value: true Since: DataTables 1.10 Example with the API:

table.search('"New York" -Chief', {
    smart: true
});

Custom search

If the above options for customising DataTables' built in search does not match your needs, you can use functions as a search term providing the ability to use 100% custom logic for the search. See search() and the search manual for details.