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$not

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$not

Syntax: { field: { $not: { <operator-expression> } } }

$not performs a logical NOT operation on the specified <operator-expression> and selects the documents that do not match the <operator-expression>. This includes documents that do not contain the field.

Consider the following query:

db.inventory.find( { price: { $not: { $gt: 1.99 } } } )

This query will select all documents in the inventory collection where:

  • the price field value is less than or equal to 1.99 or
  • the price field does not exist

{ $not: { $gt: 1.99 } } is different from the $lte operator. { $lte: 1.99 } returns only the documents where price field exists and its value is less than or equal to 1.99.

Remember that the $not operator only affects other operators and cannot check fields and documents independently. So, use the $not operator for logical disjunctions and the $ne operator to test the contents of fields directly.

Behavior

$not and Data Types

The operation of the $not operator is consistent with the behavior of other operators but may yield unexpected results with some data types like arrays.

$not and Regular Expressions

$not operator can perform logical NOT operation on:

  • regular expression objects (i.e. /pattern/)

    For example, the following query selects all documents in the inventory collection where the item field value does not start with the letter p.

    db.inventory.find( { item: { $not: /^p.*/ } } )
    
  • $regex operator expression (Starting in MongoDB 4.0.7)

    For example, the following query selects all documents in the inventory collection where the item field value does not start with the letter p.

    db.inventory.find( { item: { $not: { $regex: "^p.*" } } } )
    db.inventory.find( { item: { $not: { $regex: /^p.*/ } } } )
    
  • driver language’s regular expression objects

    For example, the following PyMongo query uses Python’s re.compile() method to compile a regular expression:

    import re
    for noMatch in db.inventory.find( { "item": { "$not": re.compile("^p.*") } } ):
        print noMatch
    
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