fnFilter + Regex

Hi I've seen other examples of using Regular expressions with fnFilter but I can't seem to get it working for myself. I need to filter a column that lists US States by the record ID which is a number... what's happening is that the results are being filtered by only the first part of the ID - for instance when I try and filter for the state "Arizona" which is ID = "3" it will also show "Oregon" in the results which has an ID of "36" - so it's only seeing "3" in Oregon and including it in results.

I'm guessing that fnFilter does a "LIKE" query instead of an "="?

here is my php code:

<select name="state" id="state">
    <option value="">All States</option>
    <?php foreach ($state as $states): ?>
    <option value="<?php echo $states['state_id']; ?>"><?php echo $states['state']; ?></option>
    <?php endforeach; ?>
     ?>
</select>

Here's the javascript:

$('#state').bind('change', function() {
    oTable.fnFilter( $(this).val(), 5 ); 
 });

I've looked through other posts and have tried to use Regex like this:

var state = "^"$(this).val();
oTable.fnFilter( state, 5, false );

But this doesn't work at all...