Using Python Regular Expression in Django.

Question

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 1

It should look more like r'^org/(?P<company_name>\w+)'

>>> r = re.compile(r'^org/(?P<company_name>\w+)')
>>> r.match('org/companyA').groups()
('companyA',)

Answer 2

Your regex isn't valid. It should probably look like

r'^org/(?P<company_name>\w+)/$'

Answer 3

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'}