Question

I’ve been searching around for some time for this, but have still not found an answer, maybe its got some thing to do with regular expressions, but i think there should be a simple answer that I am missing here. It seems very trivial to me … here goes:

On the python interpreter I get:

"abc" in "abc123" 

as True.

I want it a command that returns a False. I want the entire word to be matched.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you want to do a plain match of just one word, use ==:

'abc' == 'abc123' # false

If you’re doing 'abc' in ['cde','fdabc','abc123'], that returns False anyway:

'abc' in ['cde','fdabc','abc123'] # False

The reason 'abc' in 'abc123' returns true, from the docs:

For the Unicode and string types, x in y is true if and only if x is a
substring of y. An equivalent test is y.find(x) != -1.

So for comparing against a single string, use ‘==’, and if comparing in a collection of strings, in can be used (you could also do 'abc' in ['abc123'] – since the behaviour of in works as your intuition imagines when y is a list or collection of sorts.