django query-set regex giving extra results

Question

I am trying a make a regex query on django query set. I have a column having values like

'67,42,16', '16,42,67,70', '4,11,21,78', '12,45,6,22'

I want to extract columns having either '4' or '70' in them. Here is my regex

 _regex = r"(^|(\d*,)+)%s((,\d*)+|$)" %('4|70')

and my query

dict(Table.objects.filter(column__regex=_regex).values_list('row_id','column'))

Its returning the following result

{1563864L: u'67,42,16', 1563804L: u'16,42,67,70', 1563863L: u'4,11,21,78'}

I am expecting this result 1563804L: u'16,42,67,70', 1563863L: u'4,11,21,78'

Not sure why I am getting 1563864L: u'67,42,16' as a result

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I can only guess what you're trying to do, as it's always difficult to reverse a regular expression's original intent. Try this.

_regex = '(^({0}),.+)|(.+,({0}),.+)|(.+,({0})$)'.format('4|70')

And a little more pythonic:

acceptable_values = [4, 70]
regex_template = '(^({0}),.+)|(.+,({0}),.+)|(.+,({0})$)'
_regex = regex_template.format('|'.join([str(v) for v in acceptable_values]))