How to make this search query in django?

Question

my search query works fine when i fill the book and chapter in my searchfield. but when i only fill in the book i get an error. Can somebody help me?

Request Method: GET Request URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000/search/?q=genesis Django Version: 3.0 Exception Type: ValueError Exception Value:
not enough values to unpack (expected 2, got 1)

def get_queryset(self): 
    query = self.request.GET.get('q')
    book, chapter = query.split()

    object_list = Verse.objects.filter(
        Q(book__icontains=book) & Q(
            chapter__exact=chapter))

    return object_list

Answer 1

This does not work, since then there is only one word, and hence query.split() will return a singleton list.

def get_queryset(self): 
    query = self.request.GET.get('q')
    object_list = Verse.objects.all()
    if query:
        query = query.split()
        object_list = object_list.filter(book__icontains=query[0])
        if :
            object_list = object_list.filter(chapter=query[1])
    return object_list

I'm however not convinced that splitting by a space is a good idea here. If the book name contains spaces, then .split() will thus split the title, and you will take the second word as chapter . You might want to split on an identifier like a colon ( : ).