Question

I am currently defining regular expressions in order to capture parameters in a URL, as described in the tutorial. How do I access parameters from the URL as part the HttpRequest object?

My HttpRequest.GET currently returns an empty QueryDict object.

I’d like to learn how to do this without a library, so I can get to know Django better.

Answer 1

When a URL is like domain/search/?q=haha, you would use request.GET.get('q', '').

q is the parameter you want, and '' is the default value if q isn’t found.

However, if you are instead just configuring your URLconf**, then your captures from the regex are passed to the function as arguments (or named arguments).

Such as:

(r'^user/(?P<username>\w{0,50})/$', views.profile_page,), 

Then in your views.py you would have

def profile_page(request, username):     # Rest of the method