No way to combine case-insensitive contains() with autoescape

Migrated issue, originally created by v (@vr2262)

I would like to filter a query with ILIKE while escaping special characters like % and _. I tried this:

from sqlalchemy import *
from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base
from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker

Base = declarative_base()


class Example(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'example'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    string_col = Column(String)


session = sessionmaker()()
session.add(Example(string_col='S%mething'))

search_string = 's%'
print(
    session.query(Example)
    .filter(
        func.lower(Example.string_col)
        .contains(func.lower(search_string), autoescape=True)
    )
)

But I get the error TypeError: String value expected when autoescape=True because contains() expects an actual string as the first argument.

Ideally SQLAlchemy would provide this feature out of the box, perhaps with icontains() or contains(insensitive=True, ...).

[sqlalchemy-bot]

Michael Bayer (@zzzeek) wrote:

all you have to do is call lower() on the string:

print(
    session.query(Example)
    .filter(
        func.lower(Example.string_col)
        .contains(search_string.lower(), autoescape=True)
    )
)

that’s the beauty of it being a string in the first place.

icontains() is already #3482.

[sqlalchemy-bot]

Changes by v (@vr2262):

• removed labels: duplicate