IMPORTANT: No additional bug fixes or documentation updates will be released for this version. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.
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Elastic Docs ›Painless Scripting Language [5.6] ›Painless Language Specification

Painless Syntax

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IMPORTANT: This documentation is no longer updated. Refer to Elastic's version policy and the latest documentation.

Painless Syntax

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The Painless scripting language is new and is still marked as experimental. The syntax or API may be changed in the future in non-backwards compatible ways if required.

Control flow

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Painless supports all of Java’s control flow statements except the switch statement.

Painless also supports the for in syntax from Groovy:

for (def item : list) {
  ...
}

Functions

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You can declare functions at the beginning of a Painless script, for example:

boolean isNegative(def x) { x < 0 }
...
if (isNegative(someVar)) {
  ...
}

Lambda expressions

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Lambda expressions and method references work the same as in Java.

list.removeIf(item -> item == 2);
list.removeIf((int item) -> item == 2);
list.removeIf((int item) -> { item == 2 });
list.sort((x, y) -> x - y);
list.sort(Integer::compare);

You can make method references to functions within the script with this, for example list.sort(this::mycompare).

Patterns

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Regular expression constants are directly supported. To ensure fast performance, this is the only mechanism for creating patterns. Regular expressions are always constants and compiled efficiently a single time.

Pattern p = /[aeiou]/
Pattern flags
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You can define flags on patterns in Painless by adding characters after the trailing / like /foo/i or /foo \w #comment/iUx. Painless exposes all of the flags from Java’s Pattern class using these characters:

Character Java Constant Example

c

CANON_EQ

'å' ==~ /å/c (open in hex editor to see)

i

CASE_INSENSITIVE

'A' ==~ /a/i

l

LITERAL

'[a]' ==~ /[a]/l

m

MULTILINE

'a\nb\nc' =~ /^b$/m

s

DOTALL (aka single line)

'a\nb\nc' =~ /.b./s

U

UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS

'Ɛ' ==~ /\\w/U

u

UNICODE_CASE

'Ɛ' ==~ /ɛ/iu

x

COMMENTS (aka extended)

'a' ==~ /a #comment/x

Dereferences

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Like lots of languages, Painless uses . to reference fields and call methods:

String foo = 'foo';
TypeWithGetterOrPublicField bar = new TypeWithGetterOrPublicField()
return foo.length() + bar.x

Like Groovy, Painless uses ?. to perform null-safe references, with the result being null if the left hand side is null:

String foo = null;
return foo?.length()  // Returns null

Unlike Groovy, Painless doesn’t support writing to null values with this operator:

TypeWithSetterOrPublicField foo = null;
foo?.x = 'bar'  // Compile error
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