Help getting a string out of regex

[bowlofred]

join() is an operator on a string, and it doesn't modify anything. It returns a new string.

Since you're not assigning the result of the join, the result is thrown away and y remains the same.

y = "Hello, world!"
l = ["one", "two", "three"]
y.join(l)
print(y)  # no change

y = y.join(l) # assigns the change back to y
print(y)    # now the change is seen

Output:
Hello, world!
oneHello, world!twoHello, world!three

That said, I'm not sure you want to join() at all. It sounds like you just want to concatenate two strings. You can do that with a plus symbol if you have two strings.