QuerySet for non-empty TextField

Question

For a model like:

class Item(models.Model):
    notes = models.TextField(blank=True)
    ....

I'm attempting to do a simple queryset for all Items where the "notes" field is non-empty. Not finding mention of this capability in the docs, but via a comment on a bug report, discovered that you can actually compare with greater than:

items_with_notes = Item.objects.filter(notes__gt='')

This works, but feels like a hack. "Greater than" seems like it should be used for numeric comparisons, not for checking whether a text field is blank. Surprised not to find something like:

Item.objects.exclude(notes=blank)

Am I overlooking something, or is .filter(notes__gt='') the right way to do it?

Answer 1

.exclude(notes=u'')