Whole-word match only in Django query

Use “\y” instead of “\b” when you're using PostgreSQL, this is because Django passes your regular expression straight down to PostgreSQL – so your RegEx's need to be compatible with it. You should be able to execute them from psql without any problems.

result = Model.objects.filter(text__iregex=r"\y{0}\y".format(stringVariable))

See https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/functions-matching.html#POSIX-CONSTRAINT-ESCAPES-TABLE

You might be able to get something by dropping the regex and using a few django lookups

result = Model.objects.filter(Q(text__contains=' someword ') |                              Q(text__contains=' someword.') |                              Q(text__istartswith = 'someword.' |                              Q(text__istartswith = 'someword.' |                              Q(text__iendswith = 'someword')

see here for docs.

I realize that's not so elegant (but makes for easy maintenance if you're not a fan of regex).

I had the same problem trying to match word boundaries using the Perl-compatible escape sequence \b. My backend database is MySQL.

I solved the problem by the character class expression [[:space:]], e.g.

        q_sum = Q()        search_list = self.form.cleaned_data['search_all'].split(' ');        for search_item in search_list:            search_regex = r"[[:space:]]%s[[:space:]]" % search_item            q_sum |= Q(message__iregex=search_regex)        queryset = BlogMessages.objects.filter(q_sum).distinct()