Using Python Regular Expression in Django

Noah Clark picture Noah Clark · Oct 25, 2009 · Viewed 19.6k times · Source

I have an web address:

http://www.example.com/org/companyA

I want to be able to pass CompanyA to a view using regular expressions.

This is what I have:

(r'^org/?P<company_name>\w+/$',"orgman.views.orgman")

and it doesn't match.

Ideally all URL's that look like example.com/org/X would pass x to the view.

Thanks in advance!

Answer

Nicholas Riley picture Nicholas Riley · Oct 25, 2009

You need to wrap the group name in parentheses. The syntax for named groups is (?P<name>regex), not ?P<name>regex. Also, if you don't want to require a trailing slash, you should make it optional.

It's easy to test regular expression matching with the Python interpreter, for example:

>>> import re
>>> re.match(r'^org/?P<company_name>\w+/$', 'org/companyA')
>>> re.match(r'^org/(?P<company_name>\w+)/?$', 'org/companyA')
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x10049c378>
>>> re.match(r'^org/(?P<company_name>\w+)/?$', 'org/companyA').groupdict()
{'company_name': 'companyA'}