How can I match an exact word in a string?

Question

I have a string in which the word local occurs many times. I used the find() function to search for this word, but it will also find e.g. locally. How can I match local exactly?

Asked By: Lalit Chattar

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Source

Answer 1

Look for ‘ local ‘? Notice that Python is case sensitive.

Answered By: Danny Navarro

Answer 2

For this kind of thing, regexps are very useful :

import re

print(re.findall('\blocal\b', "Hello, locally local test local."))
// ['local', 'local']

b means word boundary, basically. Can be space, punctuation, etc.

Edit for comment :

print(re.sub('\blocal\b', '*****', "Hello, LOCAL locally local test local.", flags=re.IGNORECASE))
// Hello, ***** locally ***** test *****.

You can remove flags=re.IGNORECASE if you don’t want to ignore the case, obviously.

Answered By: Vincent Savard

Answer 3

Do a regular expression search for blocalb

b is a “word boundry” it can include beginnings of lines, ends of lines, punctuation, etc.

You can also search case insensitively.

Answered By: OmnipotentEntity

Answer 4

You could use regular expressions to constrain the matches to occur at the word boundary, like this:

import re
p = re.compile(r'blocalb')
p.search("locally") # no match
p.search("local") # match
p.findall("rty local local k") # returns ['local', 'local']

Answered By: ssegvic

Answer 5

Below you can use simple function.

def find_word(text, search):

   result = re.findall('\b'+search+'\b', text, flags=re.IGNORECASE)
   if len(result)>0:
      return True
   else:
      return False

Using:

text = "Hello, LOCAL locally local test local."
search = "local"
if find_word(text, search):
  print "i Got it..."
else:
  print ":("

Answered By: Guray Celik

Answer 6

line1 = "This guy is local"
line2 = "He lives locally"

if "local" in line1.split():
    print "Local in line1"
if "local" in line2.split():
    print "Local in line2"

Only line1 will match.

Answered By: Toshiro

Answer 7

Using Pyparsing:

import pyparsing as pp

def search_exact_word_in_string(phrase, text):

    rule = pp.ZeroOrMore(pp.Keyword(phrase))  # pp.Keyword() is case sensitive
    for t, s, e in rule.scanString(text):
      if t:
        return t
    return False

text = "Local locally locale"
search = "Local"
print(search_exact_word_in_string(search, text))

Which Yields:

['Local']

Answered By: Raphael

Answer 8

quote = "No good deed will go unrewarded"

location = quote.rfind("go")
print(location)
// use rfind()

Answered By: Agoo Clinton

Answer 9

If you want to check for existence, try to think the other way…
and you can make something like this…

check for a pattern not equal to what you want exactly and if there’s a match
then check if the result is equal to what you want.

    st1:str ='local!'
    st2:str =' locally!'
    match1 = re.search(r'localw?',st1)
    match2 = re.search(r'localw?',st2)
    print('yes' if match1 and match1.group()=='local' else 'no')
    print('yes' if match2 and match2.group()=='local' else 'no')

Answered By: isco Adams

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