Question

I have a requirement where I need to match text like “testuser” or “joeperson” to data like “test.user” or “joe.person”. I won’t know where the period is in the incoming search term in the actual data. In short, we’ve got URLs like /cart/[user name which can have a period]/items/ and I need to search for all usernames that match that pattern.

I’m using Django and Python against a MySQL database. I know that I can do a Django query like:

User.objects.filter(username__regex='[some crazy pattern]’) but it’s the crazy pattern I need help with.

Thanks so much!

Answer 1

Use an SQL query like the following:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE REPLACE(username, '.', '') = 'username_without_dots'

Or in Django:

normalized_name = searchterm.replace('.', '')
User.objects.raw('SELECT * FROM user WHERE '
                 'REPLACE(username, '.', '') = %s', 
                 [normalized_name])