Find substring in string but only if whole words?

Question

What is an elegant way to look for a string within another string in Python, but only if the substring is within whole words, not part of a word?

Perhaps an example

Answer 1

One approach using the re, or regex, module that should accomplish this task is:

import re

string1 = "pizza pony"
string2 = "who knows what a pizza pony is?"

search_result = re.search(r'\b' + string1 + '\W', string2)

print(search_result.group())