django filter icontains match whole words only

Question

I am using the filter icontains to search for words but I only want it to match whole words. e.g. if I searched for liver I wouldn\'t want it returning delivery.

my

Answer 1

It sounds like you want a Case-insensitive exact match.

MyModel.objects.filter(title__iexact=search_word)

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets/#lookup-iexact

Answer 2

Regexp are usually enough : http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets/#regex

Please note that the regular expression syntax is that of the database backend in use.

In python (sqlite) the regexp would be :

\b(word)\b

In Mysql you have :

mysql> SELECT 'a word a' REGEXP '[[:<:]]word[[:>:]]';   -> 1
mysql> SELECT 'a xword a' REGEXP '[[:<:]]word[[:>:]]';  -> 0

Answer 3

In case you have angularjs and REST service implemented with tastypie or DRF, you can filter by whole words as $http.get(uri, {'params': {'display_name__iregex': '[[:<:]]word[[:>:]]'})

of course, display_name should be enabled to filtering in Tastypie resource's Meta class as filtering = {'display_name': ALL,}