ufTable: "not like" filter?

I’m working on site where the users are alumni of a school. I’ve added many additional user fields and have extended the user table to display these items. Now, I want to enable my admins to filter the results. I’ve made a custom sprunje and can filter items as expected (entering a search string and the table updating to show entries matching on that field).

However, there are a few searches that would require a slightly different filter behavior: displaying results for items that don’t match the search string. For example, we’ve added a “state” field and I might want to find all the users no longer in state. I know how to write a SQL/eloquent query to do this and I think I could write a filter function that always treats the search parameters as “not like” but I want a way to toggle between the modes on a per-filter basis. Has anyone implemented something like this?

I have not seen anyone do this yet, but I am sure you’re not the only one wanting this functionality. If you come up with one, I would be interested to hear your solution.

I’m not sure that’s even a feature from Tablesorter. But again we use our own filter backend. Could have custom code doing a not like if the first character is ! just like here where we filter against multiple columns : https://github.com/userfrosting/UserFrosting/blob/master/app/sprinkles/admin/src/Sprunje/PermissionSprunje.php#L71-L84