Splitting strings with Postgres and Django

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Django docs give an example of querying an ArrayField with some really powerful lookups. But what if we inherited a project, and the prior developer didn’t know about this Postgres-specific field type?

Imagine we have this version of the Post model, with a simple CharField for the tags…

class Post(models.Model):
 name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
 tags = models.CharField(max_length=200, blank=True) # not ArrayField 😞

 def __str__(self):
 return self.name

…and by convention, the tags are filled out with a pipe separator, like this: thoughts|django. It turns out we can almost query this field the same way as is done in the docs, but there’s a gotcha:

Postgresql on Greg Kaleka

Splitting strings with Postgres and Django