What is an elegant way to look for a string within another string in Python, but only if the substring is within whole words, not part of a word?
Perhaps an example
Excuse me REGEX fellows, but the simpler answer is:
text = "this is the esquisidiest piece never ever writen"
word = "is"
" {0} ".format(text).lower().count(" {0} ".format(word).lower())
The trick here is to add 2 spaces surrounding the 'text' and the 'word' to be searched, so you guarantee there will be returning only counts for the whole word and you don't get troubles with endings and beginnings of the 'text' searched.
I'm building off this answer.
The problem with the above code is that it will return false when there are multiple occurrences of needle
in haystack
, with the second occurrence satisfying the search criteria but not the first.
Here's my version:
def find_substring(needle, haystack):
search_start = 0
while (search_start < len(haystack)):
index = haystack.find(needle, search_start)
if index == -1:
return False
is_prefix_whitespace = (index == 0 or haystack[index-1] in string.whitespace)
search_start = index + len(needle)
is_suffix_whitespace = (search_start == len(haystack) or haystack[search_start] in string.whitespace)
if (is_prefix_whitespace and is_suffix_whitespace):
return True
return False
Hope that helps!
You can use regular expressions and the word boundary special character \b
(highlight by me):
Matches the empty string, but only at the beginning or end of a word. A word is defined as a sequence of alphanumeric or underscore characters, so the end of a word is indicated by whitespace or a non-alphanumeric, non-underscore character. Note that
\b
is defined as the boundary between\w
and\W
, so the precise set of characters deemed to be alphanumeric depends on the values of theUNICODE
andLOCALE
flags. Inside a character range,\b
represents the backspace character, for compatibility with Python’s string literals.
def string_found(string1, string2):
if re.search(r"\b" + re.escape(string1) + r"\b", string2):
return True
return False
Demo
If word boundaries are only whitespaces for you, you could also get away with pre- and appending whitespaces to your strings:
def string_found(string1, string2):
string1 = " " + string1.strip() + " "
string2 = " " + string2.strip() + " "
return string2.find(string1)
The simplest and most pythonic way, I believe, is to break the strings down into individual words and scan for a match:
string = "My Name Is Josh"
substring = "Name"
for word in string.split():
if substring == word:
print("Match Found")
For a bonus, here's a oneliner:
any([substring == word for word in string.split()])
def string_found(string1,string2):
if string2 in string1 and string2[string2.index(string1)-1]=="
" and string2[string2.index(string1)+len(string1)]==" ":return True
elif string2.index(string1)+len(string1)==len(string2) and
string2[string2.index(string1)-1]==" ":return True
else:return False
One approach using the re
, or regex, module that should accomplish this task is:
import re
string1 = "pizza pony"
string2 = "who knows what a pizza pony is?"
search_result = re.search(r'\b' + string1 + '\W', string2)
print(search_result.group())