How to find index of an exact word in a string in Python [duplicate]

Question

word = 'laugh'    
string = 'This is laughing laugh'
index = string.find ( word )

index is 8, should be 17. I looked around hard, but could not find an answer.

Answer 1

You should use regex (with word boundary) as str.find returns the first occurrence. Then use the start attribute of the match object to get the starting index.

import re

string = 'This is laughing laugh'

a = re.search(r'\b(laugh)\b', string)
print(a.start())
>> 17

You can find more info on how it works here.

Answer 2

try this:

word = 'laugh'    
string = 'This is laughing laugh'.split(" ")
index = string.index(word)

This makes a list containing all the words and then searches for the relevant word. Then I guess you could add all of the lengths of the elements in the list less than index and find your index that way

position = 0
for i,word in enumerate(string):
    position += (1 + len(word))
    if i>=index:
        break

print position  

Hope this helps.