Keyword arguments with spaces and the url tag

[Alexis Bellido]

Hi, I asked about this on the django-users group and was told it was probably a bug so I'm reporting it:

I was testing named url patterns and I have something like this in my URLConf:

url(r'^search/(?P<words>.*)$', 'books.views.search', name='search_page'),

The view is defined like this:

def search(request, words):

Now I'd like to print a link to the search page with certain words from a template and used the url tag like this:

<p>{% url search_page words="someword" %}</p>

When viewing on the browser I get something like '/search/someword', which is good. My question is how do I pass more than one word in the 'words'
parameter?

If I do this:

<p>{% url search_page words="someword otherword" %}</p>

I get this error:

TemplateSyntaxError at (my page name here)

Could not parse the remainder: '"someword' from '"someword

Can the url tag handle parameters with spaces?

[Johannes Dollinger]

This would be fixed by #7806.

[Natalia Bidart]

Added patch to solve this issue. Fixed involved debugging and improvments of the smart_split from [browser:/django/util/text.py], plus a simplification of split_contents at [browser:django/template/__init__.py].

All tests passes except for test_templates (regressiontests.templates.tests.Templates) which was already failing.

Made by nessita (Natalia Bidart) and matiasb (Matías Bordese, not registered yet).
Contributors understanding regexs: Ramiro Morales, Facundo Batista, Pablo Ziliani, John Lenton.

[Natalia Bidart]

Last night, while being unable to sleep, I figured out that the non-greedy part of the proposed regular expression (in teh pacth attached) can be changed to a greedy expression, improving the performance of it.

So, where it reads:

smart_split_re = re.compile(r"""(\S*?"(?:[^"\\]*(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*)"\S*| # matches '"value with spaces"' and 'keyword="value with spaces"' 
                                 \S*?'(?:[^'\\]*(?:\\.[^'\\]*)*)'\S*| # same as above but with quotes swapped 
                                 \S+)                                 # matches not whitespaces""", 
                            re.VERBOSE) 

the \S+?" can be changed to [^\s"]" (same for the ' character). I'll submit a new patch in a while, prior some checkings.

[Natalia Bidart]

Attaching new patch with greedy regular expression (to avoid backtracking).

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

I'm not going to apply the changes to the split_contents() portion, since they don't appear to fix an existing problem I'm not convinced they don't introduce a bug. We should fix on problem per ticket.

If somebody wants to fix up that portion (and if it can be reduced to one line, that would be great), the patch should include test of the i18n pieces in that function. It's clearly looking at _("...") strings, but I don't see anything in the replacement code that handles that. It might well be being handled elsewhere automatically (so we're doing it twice now) and that will be demonstrated by the tests in the new ticket and patch.

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

(In [10462]) Fixed #9315 -- Handle spaces in URL tag arguments.

Thanks Natalia Bidart and Matías Bordese for most of this patch.

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

(In [10463]) [1.0.X] Fixed #9315 -- Handle spaces in URL tag arguments.

Thanks Natalia Bidart and Matías Bordese for most of this patch.

Backport of r10462 from trunk.

[Natalia Bidart]

Malcom,

you're welcome! We had the most fun proposing a solution for this one. We would love to keep contributing to the django project.

[Jacob]

Milestone 1.1 deleted