How to get all rows containing (or equaling) a particular ID from an HBase table? - regex

Question

I have a method which select the row whose rowkey contains the parameter passed into.
HTable table = new HTable(Bytes.toBytes(objectsTableName), connection);
public List<ObjectId> lookUp(String partialId) {
if (partialId.matches("[a-fA-F0-9]+")) {
// create a regular expression from partialId, which can
//match any rowkey that contains partialId as a substring,
//and then get all the row with the specified rowkey
} else {
throw new IllegalArgumentException(
"query must be done with hexadecimal values only");
}
}
I don't know how to finish code above.
I just know the following code can get the row with specified rowkey in Hbase.
String rowkey = "123";
Get get = new Get(Bytes.toBytes(rowkey));
Result result = table.get(get);

Answer 1

You can use RowFilter filter with RegexStringComparator to do that. Or, if it is just to fetch the rows which match a given substring you can use RowFilter with SubstringComparator. This is how you use HBase filters :
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
Configuration conf = HBaseConfiguration.create();
HTable table = new HTable(conf, "demo");
Scan s = new Scan();
Filter f = new RowFilter(CompareOp.EQUAL, new SubstringComparator("abc"));
s.setFilter(f);
ResultScanner rs = table.getScanner(s);
for(Result r : rs){
System.out.println("RowKey : " + Bytes.toString(r.getRow()));
//rest of your logic
}
rs.close();
table.close();
}
The above piece of code will give you all the rows which contain abc as a part of their rowkeys.
HTH