# Search Filter React Native | Search Bar Tutorial
# Code with Beto · https://codewithbeto.dev/blog/search-filter
# Plain-text export for AI agents and LLM tools
# Source: Code with Beto

## About Code with Beto

**Code with Beto** ([codewithbeto.dev](https://codewithbeto.dev)) is an online learning platform by **Alberto Moedano** (Beto, [@betomoedano on X](https://x.com/betomoedano)). It helps developers ship production-ready **React Native**, **React**, **TypeScript**, and **Git** apps through video courses, real project walkthroughs, and production codebases (not toy demos or slide-only tutorials).

Members get structured learning paths (React Native, React with TypeScript, Git, LiveStore), optional **lifetime access** (Basic or Pro), premium templates such as **Platano**, technical blog articles, and examples from shipped products like **Inkigo**. The teaching focus is maintainable architecture, native-feeling UX, Expo and modern React Native tooling, and workflows that work well with AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT).

## This document

- **Title:** Search Filter React Native | Search Bar Tutorial
- **Canonical URL:** https://codewithbeto.dev/blog/search-filter
- **Agents export:** https://codewithbeto.dev/blog/search-filter/agents.txt
- **Author:** Beto
- **Published:** March 17, 2022
- **Summary:** Search Filter using React Native.
- **Access tier:** public (full article in this file)

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---

## Hello everyone 👋🏼

I am very excited to share some of the things that I have learned in my journey as a software engineer.
For those who want to see the code of this tutorial => [Here!](https://github.com/betomoedano/React-Navigation-Tutorial)
For those who want to watch the video version => [Here!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s542Fe7QBuM)

## Creating the project

We are going to be using Expo for this project so the command to create our app would be something like this

> Create a project named search-filter

```bash
$ expo init search-filter
```

> Navigate to the project directory

```bash
$ cd search-filter
```

## Installing dependencies

we are going to need basic navigation for our app, once you are in your project folder run the following commands.

```bash
$ yarn add @react-navigation/native
$ expo install react-native-screens react-native-safe-area-context
$ yarn add @react-navigation/native-stack
$ yarn add @react-navigation/bottom-tabs
```

Once the dependencies are installed we can go ahead and start de development server

> Start the development server

```bash
$ expo start
```

## Navigation

Now we are going to set the navigation for our app
We have a bottom tab with two screens, MyStack and Settings and we also have a component called MyStack which contains the Home and the Stack screen
Here we have the code for the navigation.

```js
import React from "react";
import { createBottomTabNavigator } from "@react-navigation/bottom-tabs";
import { createNativeStackNavigator } from "@react-navigation/native-stack";
import { NavigationContainer } from "@react-navigation/native";

//screens
import HomeScreen from "./screens/HomeScreen";
import SettingsScreen from "./screens/SettingsScreen";
import StackScreen from "./screens/StackScreen";

import MaterialCommunityIcons from "react-native-vector-icons/MaterialCommunityIcons";

const HomeStackNavigator = createNativeStackNavigator();

function MyStack() {
  return (
    <HomeStackNavigator.Navigator initialRouteName="HomeScreen">
      <HomeStackNavigator.Screen name="HomeScreen" component={HomeScreen} />
      <HomeStackNavigator.Screen
        name="Stack"
        component={StackScreen}
        options={{
          headerBackTitleVisible: false,
        }}
      />
    </HomeStackNavigator.Navigator>
  );
}

const Tab = createBottomTabNavigator();

function MyTabs() {
  return (
    <Tab.Navigator
      initialRouteName="Home"
      screenOptions={{
        tabBarActiveTintColor: "purple",
      }}
    >
      <Tab.Screen
        name="Home"
        component={MyStack}
        options={{
          tabBarLabel: "Feed",
          tabBarIcon: ({ color, size }) => (
            <MaterialCommunityIcons name="home" color={color} size={30} />
          ),
          tabBarBadge: 10,
          headerShown: false,
        }}
      />
      <Tab.Screen
        name="Settings"
        component={SettingsScreen}
        options={{
          tabBarLabel: "Settings",
          tabBarIcon: ({ color, size }) => (
            <MaterialCommunityIcons
              name="brightness-5"
              color={color}
              size={30}
            />
          ),
        }}
      />
    </Tab.Navigator>
  );
}

export default function Navigation() {
  return (
    <NavigationContainer>
      <MyTabs />
    </NavigationContainer>
  );
}
```

Note that we also need to create our screens files:

> `HomeScreen.js`

> `SettingsScreen.js`

> `StackScreen.js`

For `SettingsScreen` and `StackScreen` we will just show a text as the following code.

```js
import React from "react";
import { View, Text } from "react-native";

const SettingsScreen = () => {
  return (
    <View>
      <Text
        style={{
          fontSize: 30,
          textAlign: "center",
          marginTop: "20%",
        }}
      >
        Settings Screen
      </Text>
    </View>
  );
};

export default SettingsScreen;
```

```js
import React from "react";
import { View, Text } from "react-native";

const StackScreen = () => {
  return (
    <View>
      <Text
        style={{
          fontSize: 30,
          textAlign: "center",
          marginTop: "20%",
        }}
      >
        Stack Screen
      </Text>
    </View>
  );
};

export default StackScreen;
```

Finally we can start working on our HomeScreen.js file, for now we can just show a text as well while we are working on getting the fake data from our API.

```js
import React from "react";
import { View, Text } from "react-native";

const HomeScreen = () => {
  return (
    <View>
      <Text
        style={{
          fontSize: 30,
          textAlign: "center",
          marginTop: "20%",
        }}
      >
        HomeScreen Screen
      </Text>
    </View>
  );
};

export default HomeScreen;
```

## Getting fake data from Random user API

After we have our project running we can now get our fake data from our API.

We will need to import useEffect and useState from react, we create a variable called `data` that is going to contain the fake users, then we simply use the built-in function `“fetch”` to get the data then we transform the response to a json file and finally, we set our data.

You can console.log the response to check what kind of data we got and play around with it.

```js
import React, { useEffect, useState } from "react";
import { View, Text } from "react-native";

const HomeScreen = () => {
  const [data, setData] = useState([]);

  useEffect(() => {
    fetchData("https://randomuser.me/api/?results=20");
  }, []);

  const fetchData = async (url) => {
    try {
      const response = await fetch(url);
      const json = await response.json();
      setData(json.results);
      setFilteredData(json.results);
      console.log(json.results);
    } catch (error) {
      console.error(error);
    }
  };

  return (
    <View>
      <Text
        style={{
          fontSize: 30,
          textAlign: "center",
          marginTop: "20%",
        }}
      >
        Home Screen
      </Text>
    </View>
  );
};

export default HomeScreen;
```

## Displaying the data

Now that we have our data, we need to show it on screen.
We will map throw the data array and render a simple component that shows each user in our array.

```js
  return (
    <ScrollView>
      <Text style={styles.textFriends}>{data.length} Friends</Text>
      {data.map((item, index) => {
        return (
          <View key={index} style={styles.itemContainer}>
            <Image source={{ uri: item.picture.large }} style={styles.image} />
            <View>
              <Text style={styles.textName}>
                {item.name.first} {item.name.last}
              </Text>
              <Text style={styles.textEmail}>{item.login.username}</Text>
            </View>
          </View>
        );
      })}
    </ScrollView>
  );
};

export default HomeScreen;

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
  textFriends: {
    fontSize: 20,
    textAlign: "left",
    marginLeft: 10,
    fontWeight: "bold",
    marginTop: 10,
  },
  itemContainer: {
    flexDirection: "row",
    alignItems: "center",
    marginLeft: 10,
    marginTop: 10,
  },
  image: {
    width: 50,
    height: 50,
    borderRadius: 25,
  },
  textName: {
    fontSize: 17,
    marginLeft: 10,
    fontWeight: "600",
  },
  textEmail: {
    fontSize: 14,
    marginLeft: 10,
    color: "grey",
  },
});
```

## Adding the search bar and filtering data. Finally! 🎉

- First, we need to import `useNavigation`
- Using another useEffect we will set the header options for HomeScreen
- We also need another variable to hold the filtered data
- Finally, we create a function called `searchFilterFunction()` that will check if we have text in the search bar,
  if we have text then we will pass that text to uppercase and since we are filtering the data by name we also pass the name to uppercase.
  Then we simply return the filtered data using the method `indexOf()` which returns the first index at which a given element (text)
  can be found in the array, or -1 if it is not present.

After we add that our code should look like this.

```js
import React, { useEffect, useState } from "react";
import {
  View,
  Text,
  StyleSheet,
  TouchableOpacity,
  ScrollView,
  Image,
} from "react-native";
import { useNavigation } from "@react-navigation/native";

const HomeScreen = () => {
  const navigation = useNavigation();
  const [data, setData] = useState([]);
  const [filteredData, setFilteredData] = useState([]);

  useEffect(() => {
    fetchData("https://randomuser.me/api/?results=30");
  }, []);

  useEffect(() => {
    navigation.setOptions({
      headerLargeTitle: true,
      headerTitle: "Home",
      headerRight: () => (
        <TouchableOpacity
          onPress={() => navigation.navigate("Stack")}
          style={{
            backgroundColor: "purple",
            width: 30,
            height: 30,
            borderRadius: 10,
            justifyContent: "center",
          }}
        >
          <Text
            style={{
              fontSize: 20,
              textAlign: "center",
              color: "white",
            }}
          >
            +
          </Text>
        </TouchableOpacity>
      ),
      headerSearchBarOptions: {
        placeholder: "Friends",
        onChangeText: (event) => {
          searchFilterFunction(event.nativeEvent.text);
        },
      },
    });
  }, [navigation]);

  const fetchData = async (url) => {
    try {
      const response = await fetch(url);
      const json = await response.json();
      setData(json.results);
      setFilteredData(json.results);
      console.log(json.results);
    } catch (error) {
      console.error(error);
    }
  };

  const searchFilterFunction = (text) => {
    if (text) {
      const newData = data.filter((item) => {
        const itemData = item.name.first
          ? item.name.first.toUpperCase()
          : "".toUpperCase();
        const textData = text.toUpperCase();
        return itemData.indexOf(textData) > -1;
      });
      setFilteredData(newData);
    } else {
      setFilteredData(data);
    }
  };

  return (
    <ScrollView>
      <Text style={styles.textFriends}>{filteredData.length} Friends</Text>
      {filteredData.map((item, index) => {
        return (
          <View key={index} style={styles.itemContainer}>
            <Image source={{ uri: item.picture.large }} style={styles.image} />
            <View>
              <Text style={styles.textName}>
                {item.name.first} {item.name.last}
              </Text>
              <Text style={styles.textEmail}>{item.login.username}</Text>
            </View>
          </View>
        );
      })}
    </ScrollView>
  );
};

export default HomeScreen;

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
  textFriends: {
    fontSize: 20,
    textAlign: "left",
    marginLeft: 10,
    fontWeight: "bold",
    marginTop: 10,
  },
  itemContainer: {
    flexDirection: "row",
    alignItems: "center",
    marginLeft: 10,
    marginTop: 10,
  },
  image: {
    width: 50,
    height: 50,
    borderRadius: 25,
  },
  textName: {
    fontSize: 17,
    marginLeft: 10,
    fontWeight: "600",
  },
  textEmail: {
    fontSize: 14,
    marginLeft: 10,
    color: "grey",
  },
});
```

## Conclusion

That is all it takes to create that useful functionality. Happy Coding!

[Buy me a coffee! ☕️](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/betomoedano)