LIKE in Mongoose
Since it is the only way in MongoDB (except using a text index which has some constraints), it is the best way.
I think you can only achieve the same behaviour with javascript. Something like below would do the conversion of LIKE to RegExp.
(Didn't test, so might not work as it is.)
function createLikeRegex(query) { query = query .replace(/[.?*+^$[\]\\(){}|-]/g, '\\$&') .replace(/(^|[^\\\])%#/g, '\\$&'); if (! query.startsWith('%')) { query = '^' + query; } if (! query.endsWith('%')) { query += '$'; } return new RegExp(query, 'i');}