How to set up my urls with posts/1, posts/2, etc? - django

Question

I'm following a few of the basic django blog tutorials. The part I am stuck on is how to set variables in my urls.
I want my urls to look like:
posts/1
posts/2
posts/3
Currently when i visit my index.html i see the list of blog posts (just the titles), and when I hover the cursor over each link it does show posts/1, posts/2, etc.
The problem is that when I click on these links, it basically just refreshes the page and does not show the detailed view.
my urls.py currently looks like this:
url(r'^posts/', index),
url(r'^posts/(?P<post_id>[0-9]+)/$', detailedview),
I'm not sure exactly what (?P[0-9]+)/$', does and I'm assuming this is the problem because detailedview is never being called.
This method is inside my views.py but again, it is never being called.
def detailedview(request, post_id):
targetpost = Post.objects.get(id="post_id")
context = {'targetpost': targetpost}
return render(request, 'posts/detailedview.html', context)

Answer 1

Your question about the second URL:
(?P<post_id>[0-9]+) is a regex that means "set the post_id argument to the value of any number with one or more digits (more info at https://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html.)
The way to fix your problem is to add a $ to the end of the first pattern, so it looks like this:
url(r'^posts/$', index),
This will make it only match the URL /posts/.
There is also a problem with your view: the line
targetpost = Post.objects.get(id="post_id")
should be:
targetpost = Post.objects.get(id=post_id)
This will make Django look for the Post with the id specified in the variable post_id, rather than the Post with the id that equals the string "post_id"