How to match a whole word with a regular expression?

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

Try

re.search(r'bisb', your_string)

From the docs:

b 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, b is seen as “backspace” instead of regex word boundary.