django filter icontains match whole words only

Question

I am using the filter icontains to search for words but I only want it to match whole words. e.g. if I searched for liver I wouldn't want it returning delivery.

my query looks like this

MyModel.objects.filter(title__icontains=search_word)

I have seen the filter __search but this does not bring back results with 3 characters or less and the site I am building contains a lot of these which could be searched for, e.g. 'bbc'

I do not have access to the db but if anyone knows how I can disable this in the code then I would be happy to switch to using this as an alternative.

Answer 1

Regexp are usually enough : http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets/#regex

Please note that the regular expression syntax is that of the database backend in use.

In python (sqlite) the regexp would be :

\b(word)\b

In Mysql you have :

mysql> SELECT 'a word a' REGEXP '[[:<:]]word[[:>:]]';   -> 1
mysql> SELECT 'a xword a' REGEXP '[[:<:]]word[[:>:]]';  -> 0