[patch] regular expression field lookups

[Tom Tobin <korpios@…>]

The attached patch implements regular expression field lookups against r2487 of trunk.

The lookups are performed via "fieldname__regex" or "fieldname__iregex" for case-sensitive and -insensitive matching, respectively.

Only PostgreSQL implements case-sensitive matching; for all other databases, case-insensitive matching is performed regardless of which type is specified.

Only PostgreSQL (assuming system defaults) and sqlite implement PCRE-ish "advanced" regular expressions; the other databases only support POSIX "extended" regular expressions.

MSSQL/Transact-SQL does not implement regular expressions (as far as I can tell from the documentation available at MSDN); attempting to use regex or iregex field lookups with this backend will raise a NotImplementedError.

Regular expression searches can be performed through the admin interface by prepending and appending a slash ("/") character to the search term (e.g., /like this/). This is backwards-incompatible, but with a low chance of collision with existing usage (i.e., it's unlikely that a user is going to input a search phrase both beginning and ending with a slash; I considered adding a toggle for this behavior in settings.py, but decided against it for the time being).

[Tom Tobin <korpios@…>]

patch against r2487 of trunk to implement regular expression field lookups

[Tom Tobin <korpios@…>]

IIRC, the core developers liked the idea but disliked the admin regex searches. I'll create an updated patch against current trunk if I know what behavior to implement. :)

[Tom Tobin <korpios@…>]

Patch aganst r5486 of trunk to implement regex field lookups

[Tom Tobin <korpios@…>]

I've brought the patch for this ticket's implementation up to date; documentation is now included, as well as full support for both case sensitive and insensitive matching on the supported platforms (MySQL, PostgreSQL, and sqlite).

[Tom Tobin <korpios@…>]

Patch aganst r5490 of trunk to implement regex field lookups, w/docs, w/tests

[Tom Tobin <korpios@…>]

The latest incarnation of the patch now has tests, as well.

[Tom Tobin <korpios@…>]

Patch aganst r5519 of trunk (post-oracle-merge) to implement regex field lookups

[Tom Tobin <korpios@…>]

Fixed the patch to apply cleanly after [5519].

[Tom Tobin <korpios@…]

Added (yet-untested) oracle support.

[ian.g.kelly@…]

Initially I got this error:

      File "/home/ikelly/projects/django.trunk/django/db/models/query.py", line 802, in get_where_clause
        if settings.DATABASE_ENGINE == 'oracle':
    NameError: global name 'settings' is not defined

After adding the appropriate import statement, the test cases passed and I didn't find any bugs.

[Tom Tobin <korpios@…>]

With working oracle support, yay!

[Tom Tobin <korpios@…>]

I think we're all set with the latest version of the patch. Requesting final review and (hopefully) commit. ^_^

[Jacob]

(In [5555]) Fixed #1465: added support for regex lookups. Thanks, Tom Tobin.