python - string match only whole words

Question

I have two lists - query and line. My code finds if a query such as:

["president" ,"publicly"]

Is contained in a line (order matters) such as:

["president" ,"publicly", "told"]

And this is the code I'm currently using:

if ' '.join(query) in ' '.join(line)

Problem is, I want to match whole words only. So the query below won't pass the condition statement:

["president" ,"pub"]

How can I do that?

Answer 1

Here is one way:

re.search(r'\b' + re.escape(' '.join(query)) + r'\b', ' '.join(line)) is not None