How to match a whole word with a regular expression?

python, regex

Solution

Try

re.search(r'\bis\b', your_string)

From the docs:

`\b` Matches the empty string, but only at the beginning or end of a word.

Note that the `re` module uses a naive definition of "word" as a "sequence of alphanumeric or underscore characters", where "alphanumeric" depends on locale or unicode options.

Also note that without the raw string prefix, `\b` is seen as "backspace" instead of regex word boundary.

Problem

I'm having trouble finding the correct regular expression for the scenario below: Lets say: ``` a = "this is a sample" ``` I want to match whole word - for example match `"hi"` should return False since `"hi"` is not a word and `"is"` should return True since there is no alpha character on the left and on the right side.

Original source

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