Regex for existence of some words whose order doesn't matter

Question

I would like to write a regex for searching for the existence of some words, but their order of appearance doesn\'t matter.

For example, search for \"Tim\" and \"st

Answer 1

You can use Positive Lookahead to achieve this. The lookahead approach is nice for matching strings that contain both substrings regardless of order.

pattern = re.compile(r'^(?=.*Tim)(?=.*stupid).*$')

Example:

>>> s = '''Hey there stupid, hey there Tim
Hi Tim, this is stupid
Hi Tim, this is great'''
...
>>> import re
>>> pattern = re.compile(r'^(?=.*Tim)(?=.*stupid).*$', re.M)
>>> pattern.findall(s)

# ['Hey there stupid, hey there Tim', 'Hi Tim, this is stupid']