Question

i want to match “stackover” stored in a variable x in “stackoverflow”,

using perl i can do this as follows;

$x = "stackover";
$y = "stackoverflow";
if ($y =~ /^$x/){
    print "success";
}

how do i do this in python,
i cannot have x variable in the regex

reg = re.compile("x")  # this will match x instead of matching stackover

thanks

Answer 1

>>> y = 'stackoverflow'
>>> x = 'stackover'
>>> if re.match('^%s' % x, y):
...     print "success"
... 
success

Or

>>> if re.match('^{0}'.format(x), y):
...     print "success"
... 
success

Strictly speaking, '^' is unnecessary when using .match(), which always seeks a match at the beginning of the string. But I’m leaving it in as a placeholder for other, more complicated regexes.