How to match a string in a sentence

Question

I want to check whether a particular string is present in a sentence. I am using simple code for this purpose

subStr = 'joker'
Sent = 'Hello World I am Joker'

if subStr.lower() in Sent.lower():
    print('found')

This is an easy straightforward approach, but it fails when sentence appears as

hello world I am Jo ker

hello world I am J oker

As I am parsing sentence from a PDF file some unnecessary spaces are coming here and there.

A simple approach to tackle this issue would be to remove all the spaces from a sentence and look for a substring match. I want to know other peoples thoughts on this, should I stick with this approach or look for some other alternatives.

Answer 1

This is more efficient than replace for small strings, more expensive for large strings. It won't deal with ambiguous cases, e.g. 'to day' vs 'today'.

subStr in ''.join(Sent.split()).lower()  # True

Answer 2

you can use regular expression:

import re
word_pattern = re.compile(r'j\s*o\s*k\s*e\s*r', re.I)
sent = 'Hello World I am Joker'
if word_pattern.search(sent):
    print('found')

I hope this works