How to Filter for empty or NULL names in a queryset

Question

I have first_name, last_name & alias (optional) which I need to search for. So, I need a query to give me all the names that have an alias set.

Only if I could do:

Name.objects.filter(alias!="")

So, what is the equivalent to the above?

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

You could do this:

Name.objects.exclude(alias__isnull=True)

If you need to exclude null values and empty strings, the preferred way to do so is to chain together the conditions like so:

Name.objects.exclude(alias__isnull=True).exclude(alias__exact='')

Chaining these methods together basically checks each condition independently: in the above example, we exclude rows where alias is either null or an empty string, so you get all Name objects that have a not-null, not-empty alias field. The generated SQL would look something like:

SELECT * FROM Name WHERE alias IS NOT NULL AND alias != ""

Hope this is helpfull!!

Thanks!!