Question

I’ve been using word boundaries to look up exact words in a string but just learned that they ignore non-word characters.

So when I look for “height” in the string “height (in stories)” I get the results I expect:

p = re.compile(r'\b%s\b' % 'height')
p.search('height (in stories)') # match

But when I look for “height (in stories)” in the string “height (in stories)” I don’t get a match:

p = re.compile(r'\b%s\b' % 'height (in stories)')
p.search('height (in stories)') # no match

How can I get the parentheses recognized?

Answer 1

There’s two problems.

1. You need to use re.escape(text) to create a regular expression that matches the string text.
2. There’s no word boundary between a parenthesis and the end of the string.