Matching whole words using "in" in python

Question

I've been searching around for some time for this, but have still not found an answer, maybe its got some thing to do with regular expressions, but i think there should be a simple answer that I am missing here. It seems very trivial to me ... here goes:

On the python interpreter I get:

"abc" in "abc123" 

as True.

I want it a command that returns a False. I want the entire word to be matched.

Thanks!

Answer 1

in isn't how it's done.

>>> re.search(r'\babc\b', 'abc123')
>>> re.search(r'\babc\b', 'abc 123')
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x1146780>