String exact match

Question

I have a string in which the word "LOCAL" occurs many times. I used the find() function to search for this word but it returns another word "Locally" as well. How can I match the word "local" exactly?

Answer 1

For this kind of thing, regexps are very useful :

import re  print(re.findall('\\blocal\\b', "Hello, locally local test local.")) // ['local', 'local'] 

\b means word boundary, basically. Can be space, punctuation, etc.

Edit for comment :

print(re.sub('\\blocal\\b', '*****', "Hello, LOCAL locally local test local.", flags=re.IGNORECASE)) // Hello, ***** locally ***** test *****. 

You can remove flags=re.IGNORECASE if you don't want to ignore the case, obviously.

Answer 2

Below you can use simple function.

def find_word(text, search):     result = re.findall('\\b'+search+'\\b', text, flags=re.IGNORECASE)    if len(result)>0:       return True    else:       return False 

Using:

text = "Hello, LOCAL locally local test local." search = "local" if find_word(text, search):   print "i Got it..." else:   print ":("