Filtering DataFrame by finding exact word (not combined) in a column of strings

Question

My DataFrame has two columns:

Name  Status
 a    I am Good
 b    Goodness!!!
 c    Good is what i feel
 d    Not Good-at-all

I want to filt

Answer 1

If you're defining "exact" to mean no other characters (including punctuation which defines a word boundary \b), you could instead check for a leading and trailing space and/or beginning/end anchors:

>>> df[df['Status'].str.contains(r'(?:\s|^)Good(?:\s|$)')]
  Name               Status
0    a            I am Good
2    c  Good is what i feel

Explanation:

• (?:\s|^) is a non-capturing group looking for a space character (\s) or the beginning of the string (^).

• Good is the word you're looking for.

• (?:\s|$) is a non-capturing group looking for a space character (\s) or the end of the string ($).