GROQ match filter not working with periods before wildcard (1.*)

This is actually expected behavior, not a bug! The match operator isn't designed for pattern matching with version numbers or structured strings containing periods.

Here's what's happening: The match operator is specifically for full-text search with tokenization. It treats special characters like . as word separators. So when you have version containing "1.2.3", it gets tokenized into separate searchable terms: ['1', '2', '3'].

When you query version match '1.*', the period before the wildcard causes issues because . isn't treated as a literal character - it's a word boundary. That's why version match '1.2.3' works (it matches all three tokens) but version match '1.*' doesn't work as expected.

As the match operator documentation explains, this tokenization is intentional - for example, "banana@sanity.io" gets indexed as ['banana', 'sanity', 'io'].

The solution: For version number filtering, you need to use standard GROQ string comparison instead. Here are a few approaches:

Option 1: Prefix comparison with comparison operators

// Match all versions starting with "1."
*[_type == "yourType" && version >= "1." && version < "2."]

Option 2: Use the in operator with an array

// If you have specific versions you want to match
*[_type == "yourType" && version in ["1.0.0", "1.2.3", "1.5.0"]]

Option 3: String slicing for prefix checking

// Check if first two characters are "1."
*[_type == "yourType" && version[0..2] == "1."]

The key takeaway: match is designed for free-text search scenarios (like searching article content or user-generated text), not for structured string patterns like version numbers, file paths, or IDs. For those use cases, stick with standard string comparison operators (==, >=, <) or string slicing operations.