Selecting columns by regex in Hbase scanner via Thrift (in Ruby)

The docs suggest I should be able to pass a regex as a column qualifier.

I have a columns named "F1:I" and "F2:I" in the column family "C". Consider the following:

columns = ['C:F1:I']
scanner = hbase.scannerOpen('myTable', startKey, columns)

All the "F1" rows are returned. I had hoped to be able to pass i开发者_如何学Pythonn a regex. I've tried variations of the following:

columns = ['C:F.*']
scanner = hbase.scannerOpen('myTable', startKey, columns)

Nothing.

According to HBase committer Lars George, the current version of the thrift service does not support this. The documentation referenced above is misleading.

The next version of thrift is expected to support these scenarios better.