Django simple URL Mapping issue - django

Question

Have a small issue and wondering if some one can help me out.
I have a text search box like this that
<form class="navbar-form navbar-left" role="search" action="/library/search/">
<div class="form-group" style="display:inline;">
<div class="input-group">
<input class="form-control" id="q" name="P" type="text" placeholder="Book Search"">
<span class="input-group-btn">
<button class="btn btn-primary" type="submit"><i class="glyphicon glyphicon-search"></i></button>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</form>
When I type in a word and hit submit a URL is generated as follows,
http://127.0.0.1:8000/library/search/?P=Harry+Potter
In the URLs.py I have something like this
url(r'^search/(?P<search_result>[\w|\W.#+-]+)/$', views.search_view, name='search_view')
However the above url is not being matched by the regex statement. If I manually remove the ?P= from the url it works fine.
I have tried some of the following combination and they didn't work either
url(r'^search/(?P(.*)<search_result>[\w|\W.#+-]+)/$', views.search_view, name='search_view')
Any idea what it could be ?
Thanks

Answer 1

You've misunderstood what ?P means in a regex. It states that the group is a named group, which is captured and sent to a view by a keyword argument. The URL that would satisfy that regex is like this:
/library/search/harrypotter/
But that's not at all what you want from a search; you want something like the one you have created, ie library/search/?P=harry+potter. For that you just want a URL without parameters:
r'^search/$'
and get the data in the view:
query = request.GET['p']
although you probably want to use q rather than p.