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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T03:39:57+00:00

This reg exp search correctly checks to see if a string contains the text

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This reg exp search correctly checks to see if a string contains the text harry:

re.search(r'\bharry\b', '[harry] blah', re.IGNORECASE)

However, I need to ensure that the string contains [harry]. I have tried escaping with various numbers of back-slashes:

re.search(r'\b\[harry\]\b', '[harry] blah', re.IGNORECASE)
re.search(r'\b\\[harry\\]\b', '[harry] blah', re.IGNORECASE)
re.search(r'\b\\\[harry\\\]\b', '[harry] blah', re.IGNORECASE)

None of these solutions work find the match. What do I need to do?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The first one is correct:

    r'\b\[harry\]\b'

    But this won’t match [harry] blah as [ is not a word character and so there is no word boundary. It would only match if there were a word character in front of [ like in foobar[harry] blah.

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