Python Forum

>>> name = re.compile(r'hello')
>>> mo = name.search('They shouted out hellop to the crowd')
>>> mo.group()
'hello'

how can I achieve a strict match of the word 'hello' and not 'hellop' in the above example?

name = re.compile('hello\b')

\b matches the empty string at a word boundary. This will still match 'shello', but you could put a \b at the beginning to stop that too.