Question

Ok, so I’m trying to get the distance in a str (called bigstr), from a small other variable called smallstr until it ends.
For example:

bigstr = 'What are you saying?'
smallstr = 'you'

then
distance = 8

I’m trying to use re, but I’m a total noob with this library.

Answer 1

I am not sure if you need re for that, following should suffice:

Using split:

>>> bigstr = 'What are you saying?'
>>> smallstr = 'you'
>>> bigstr.split(smallstr)
['What are ', ' saying?']
>>> words = bigstr.split(smallstr)
>>> len(words[0])
9
>>> len(words[1])
8

Using index:

>>> bigstr.index(smallstr)
9
>>> len(bigstr) - bigstr.index(smallstr) -len(smallstr)
8

Also you will notice that distance is 9 and not 8 because it counts spaces – 'What are '

You can alsways use strip to remove any spaces, if that concerns you.

If you still want to use re: Then use search

>>> import re
>>> pattern = re.compile(smallstr)
>>> match = pattern.search(bigstr)       
>>> match.span()
(9, 12)
>>>