Finding matches in Django model without punctuation or spaces

Question

I'm trying to match a string that is a GET from the URL, to a field in the database that is the same string without any punctuation or spaces. For example:

URL: http://www.mysite.com/JohnBSmith/

And the string I'm trying to match in the database is: "John B. Smith"

Can I do this with regex? One catch is that I don't know how many punctuation marks or spaces there will be.

How do I do this with Django? I want to write this in the form:

myVariable = MyModel.objects.filter(foo=bar)

Thank you in advance.

Yeah, I understand that, but my point was that I'm looking for something of the the form MyModel.objects.filter(something....) — jball037, Jul 19 '13 at 15:44
@karthikr, yes, "John B. Smith" is one field in the database. — jball037, Jul 19 '13 at 15:46
[One crude way to do it](http://stackoverflow.com/a/4590313/1628832) — karthikr, Jul 19 '13 at 15:48

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 19 '13 at 15:47

2

I would recommend adding a new column to your table, a new field to your model, maybe a SlugField and to ensure that when you save your model instance that this field is updated. You could use for this purpose django-autoslug.

answered Jul 19 '13 at 15:47

jazz

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 19 '13 at 15:52

1

This could be the regex:

John +B(\.)? +Smith

answered Jul 19 '13 at 15:52

Games Brainiac

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Finding matches in Django model without punctuation or spaces

2 Answers2