Python: Best practice for dynamically constructing regex

Question

I have a simple function to remove a "word" from some text:

def remove_word_from(word, text):
    if not text or not word: return text
    rec = re.compile(r'(^|\s)(' + word + ')($|\s)', re.IGNORECASE)    
    return rec.sub(r'\1\3', text, 1)    

The problem, of course, is that if word contains characters such as "(" or ")" things break, and it generally seems unsafe to stick a random word in the middle of a regex.

What's best practice for handling cases like this? Is there a convenient, secure function I can call to escape "word" so it's safe to use?

Answer 1

You can use re.escape(word) to escape the word.