[Feature Request]: Enhanced String Filtering in Metadata

[itaismith]

Describe the problem

This issue tracks the feature request to significantly improve the string filtering capabilities within Chroma's metadata. Currently, string filtering is limited to basic equality checks, which is insufficient for many real-world use cases that require partial matches, pattern matching, and more sophisticated string comparisons.

Additional operators users have asked for include:

• $contains (or equivalent): To check if a string metadata field contains a specific substring.
• $not_contains (or equivalent): To check if a string metadata field does not contain a specific substring.
• $like (or equivalent): To support SQL-LIKE pattern matching using wildcards (e.g., % for zero or more characters, _ for a single character).
• $regex (or equivalent): To enable filtering based on regular expressions for advanced pattern matching.

Related user issues:

• [Feature Request]: add more operators in where filter by metadata #2036
• Make $contains and $not_contains availabe for the where parameter to search in metadata fields #1940
• [Feature Request]: More complex metadata filtering #1040

Describe the proposed solution

To discuss

Alternatives considered

No response

Importance

nice to have

Additional Information

No response