Regex? Match part of or whole word

Question

I was wondering if it\'s possible to use regex with python to capture a word, or a part of the word (if it\'s at the end of the string).

Eg:
target word - potato

Answer 1

No, you can't do that with a regex as far as I know, without pointless (p|po|pot ...) matches which are excessive. Instead, just pick off the last word, and match that using a substring:

match = re.search('\S+$', haystack)
if match.group(0) == needle[:len(match.group(0))]:
    # matches.