regex - Python regular expression match whole word

Question

I'm having trouble finding the correct regular expression for the scenario below:

Lets say:

a = "this is a sample"

I want to match whole word - for example match "hi" should return False since "hi" is not a word and "is" should return True since there is no alpha character on the left and on the right side.

Answer 1

Try

re.search(r'is', your_string)

From the docs:

Matches the empty string, but only at the beginning or end of a word.

Note that the re module uses a naive definition of "word" as a "sequence of alphanumeric or underscore characters", where "alphanumeric" depends on locale or unicode options.

Also note that without the raw string prefix, is seen as "backspace" instead of regex word boundary.