---
title: "How to check whether a regular expression matches a string in Hive"
description: "What is the equivalent of Athena/Presto regexp_like in Hive"
author: "Bartosz Mikulski"
author_bio: "Principal AI Engineer & MLOps Architect. I bridge the gap between \"it works in a notebook\" and \"it works for 200 million users.\""
author_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name
author_linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikulskibartosz/
author_github: https://github.com/mikulskibartosz
canonical_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name/check-if-regex-matches-string-in-hive
---

The other day, I was porting an Athena query to run it on Hive, and I realized that the `regexp_like` function does not exist in Hive. Fortunately, there is a nice replacement that offers precisely the same behavior.

First, lets take a look at the `regexp_like` function in Presto/Athena:

```sql
regexp_like(column_name, 'regexp')
```

For example, we can use it like this to return the value of another column when a value in the row matches the regexp and return 0 when it doesn't:

```sql
CASE WHEN (regexp_like(column_name, '^[0-9]+$')) THEN cast(other_column as double) ELSE 0 END
```

To get the same behavior in Hive, I have to use the `RLIKE` keyword. Instead of `WHEN CASE` with only two branches, I can use the `IF` function:

```sql
IF(column_name RLIKE '^[0-9]+$', cast (other_column as double), 0)
```