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Asked: 2026-05-25T15:19:05+00:00

In Django, you can make database queries like the following: Model.objects.filter(name__icontains = ‘bob’) The

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In Django, you can make database queries like the following:

Model.objects.filter(name__icontains = 'bob')

The question is: how is this working ‘under the cover’? Is the double underscore a Django thing or a Python thing? Is this just a single variable named name__icontains, or is it some sort of attribute-access syntax? In the former case, how does the filter method parse the variable name to determine that you are searching the Model table for a name that contains somewhere the string bob?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It’s a Django thing, implemented with some Python things.

    In Python, you can get a dictionary of the keyword arguments passed to a function or method:

    >>> def func(*args, **kwargs):
...     print(kwargs)
>>> func(a=1, b=2)
{'a': 1, 'b': 2}

    From there, it can simply iterate over the dictionary keys and split them on __, and then interpret it however it wants. In this case, it takes the last part and interprets icontains as case-insensitive contains.

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