Django views passing in unicode name instead of string to url

Question

I have a simple personal Django project which allows someone to create a message by providing the username and message on the index page. They can then see all the messages by a given user through that link in the database.

The issue I'm facing right now is a

NoReverseMatch Error "Reverrse for 'messages' with arguments '(u'josh',)' and keyword arguments '{}' not found. 1 pattern(s) tried: ['messages/(?P<user_name>\\d+)?/']

where '(u'josh',)' is the user.name returned by:

        <li><a href="{% url 'messages' user.name %}">{{ user.name }}</a></li>

How do I strip the excess of off that so that only 'josh' is returned (which is what I'm assuming this URL wants). I want to do this in the HTML file itself.

url(r'^messages/(?P<user_name>\d+)?/', views.view_messages, name='messages'),

Models

class User (models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=20, primary_key=True)

    def __unicode__(self):              
        return self.name

class Message (models.Model):
    content = models.TextField(max_length=140, null=True, blank=True)
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)
    time = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

    def __unicode__(self):              
        return self.content

Thank you!

Answer 1

If you are using the django.contrib.auth.models.User then {{ user.name }} shouldn't return anything. I assume that you use a custom user model. If yes then you can just user {{ user.name.0 }} to get the first member of the tuple.

If instead you are using the django.contrib.auth.models.User then just try {{ user.username }} to just get the username.

Update: Hmmm then restore your template again to {{ user.name }} and change your url pattern to

url(r'^messages/(?P<user_name>\w+)?/', views.view_messages, name='messages'),

(notice the \w+ instead of the \d+: \d is for digits, \w is for characters. That's why you didn't get a match).

Answer 2

I think that the trouble is because of user_name is named parameter in url, so you can trying pass like named parameter

{% url 'messages' user_name=user.name %}

And of course you must use \w+ for the matching.

Answer 3

django uses a separate model field for directly displaying in the URL: SlugField "Slug is a newspaper term. A slug is a short label for something, containing only letters, numbers, underscores or hyphens. They’re generally used in URLs."

so either you update your model with a name_slug or just use "encoding", e.g. base64