id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
1465	[patch] regular expression field lookups	Tom Tobin <korpios@…>	Adrian Holovaty	"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).
"	enhancement	closed	Core (Other)		minor	fixed			Design decision needed	1	0	0	0	0	0