[Tutor] String matching

[Danny Yoo]

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004, Bernard Lebel wrote:

>  >>> mystring = 'helloworldmynameisbernardlebel'
>
>  >>> if not re.compile( 'bernard' ).match( mystring ) == None:
> ... 	print 'success'
>
> Well, nothing gets printed. Could anyone tell me how to achieve that
> simple type of matching?


Hi Bernard,

Oh, one more thing.  If you're just trying to see if a string is a
substring of another, then you might want to just say something like this:

###
if 'bernard' in mystring: ...
###


This is a simpler way to do a substring match.  In general, we can see if
one string is a substring of another by using the 'in' operator:

    if substring in anotherstring: ...


If we need to know where a substring matches in the larger string, then
there's a 'find()' string method that should do the trick.

###
>>> "this is a test".find("is")
2
###

Note that this find() method is only checking for substring matching: it
has no knowledge of words.  If we needed it to match the whole word, then
we'd probably need regular expressions:

###
>>> import re
>>> re.search(r'\bis\b', "this is a test").start()
5
###

But if we don't need the full power of regular expressions, then we may
prefer the simpler exact string matching that find() gives us.


Good luck!