Word boundary not working despite raw string

Question

I have a list of strings and I am trying to run a regex search on it.

I use:

re.search(r"\b" + word + r"\b", list[item], re.I)

Yet, the result of the search doesn't take into account the word boundaries and still returns wrong results. Example:

when word is try and i run the test, it still returns True for trying or country.

What am I doing wrong?

Sorry that wasn't clear. I iterate through each string in the list — Ilias, Dec 11 '16 at 23:34
`re.search(r"\b" + "try" + r"\b", "Country", re.I)` is `None`, `re.search(r"\b" + "try" + r"\b", "try for free", re.I)` is a match. It looks fine to me. — Eric Duminil, Dec 11 '16 at 23:37
Dunno, works for me. Can you show an example where it doesn't work? — Iluvatar, Dec 11 '16 at 23:37

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 13 '16 at 00:41

As mentioned in comments, your pattern looks fine.

Minor quip though--if you have a list of strings, you can simply do this instead:

for string in string_list:
    result = re.search(r"\b" + word + r"\b", string, re.I)

It avoids using the built-in Python function list.

1 Answers1