Python match a string with regex

Solution 1:

Are you sure you need a regex? It seems that you only need to know if a word is present in a string, so you can do:

>>> line = 'This,is,a,sample,string'
>>> "sample" in line
 True

Solution 2:

The r makes the string a raw string, which doesn't process escape characters (however, since there are none in the string, it is actually not needed here).

Also, re.match matches from the beginning of the string. In other words, it looks for an exact match between the string and the pattern. To match stuff that could be anywhere in the string, use re.search. See a demonstration below:

>>> import re
>>> line = 'This,is,a,sample,string'
>>> re.match("sample", line)
>>> re.search("sample", line)
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x021D32C0>
>>>