Question

I have a string in which the word local occurs many times. I used the find() function to search for this word, but it will also find e.g. locally. How can I match local exactly?

Answer 1

For this kind of thing, regexps are very useful :

import re

print(re.findall('\\blocal\\b', "Hello, locally local test local."))
// ['local', 'local']

\b means word boundary, basically. Can be space, punctuation, etc.

Edit for comment :

print(re.sub('\\blocal\\b', '*****', "Hello, LOCAL locally local test local.", flags=re.IGNORECASE))
// Hello, ***** locally ***** test *****.

You can remove flags=re.IGNORECASE if you don’t want to ignore the case, obviously.