You can use regular expressions and the word boundary special character \b
(highlight by me):
Matches the empty string, but only at the beginning or end of a word. A word is defined as a sequence of alphanumeric or underscore characters, so the end of a word is indicated by whitespace or a non-alphanumeric, non-underscore character. Note that
\b
is defined as the boundary between\w
and\W
, so the precise set of characters deemed to be alphanumeric depends on the values of theUNICODE
andLOCALE
flags. Inside a character range,\b
represents the backspace character, for compatibility with Python’s string literals.
def string_found(string1, string2):
if re.search(r"\b" + re.escape(string1) + r"\b", string2):
return True
return False
If word boundaries are only whitespaces for you, you could also get away with pre- and appending whitespaces to your strings:
def string_found(string1, string2):
string1 = " " + string1.strip() + " "
string2 = " " + string2.strip() + " "
return string2.find(string1)