You want to use re.match but that starts at the beginning of the string. You could use findall instead:

import re
grp =  "Application: Company Name / 184010 - Application Development / 184010 - Contract Express"
rgx = "\w+ *(?!.*-)"
res = re.findall(rgx, grp)
print(res)  # ['Contract ', 'Express']

Python demo

If there should also not be a forward slash following, you could add that to a character class together with the hyphen.

Note that to not match the space after the word you could omit the space followed by the asterix * from the pattern.

\w+(?!.*[-/])

Regex demo | Python demo

To check for string equality, just use the == operator:

>>> my_string = "3 ROOM"
>>> my_string == "3 ROOM"
True
>>> my_string == "3 ROOMS"
False

To check if a string contains a substring, use the in operator:

>>> my_string = "13 ROOMS"
>>> "3 ROOM" in my_string
True
>>> "30 ROOM" in my_string
False

To do a more advanced string comparison, you might want to use regular expressions:

>>> import re
>>> my_string = "3 ROOM"
>>> re.match(r"^\d ROOM$", my_string)
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x7f4ac226bb90>
>>> re.match(r"^\d ROOMS$", my_string)
None

The problem is in your playerMovement method. You are creating the string name of your room variables (ID1, ID2, ID3):

letsago = "ID" + str(self.dirDesc.values())

However, what you create is just a str. It is not the variable. Plus, I do not think it is doing what you think its doing:

>>>str({'a':1}.values())
'dict_values([1])'

If you REALLY needed to find the variable this way, you could use the eval function:

>>>foo = 'Hello World!'
>>>eval('foo')
'Hello World!'

or the globals function:

class Foo(object):
    def __init__(self):
        super(Foo, self).__init__()
    def test(self, name):
        print(globals()[name])

foo = Foo()
bar = 'Hello World!'
foo.text('bar')

However, instead I would strongly recommend you rethink you class(es). Your userInterface class is essentially a Room. It shouldn't handle player movement. This should be within another class, maybe GameManager or something like that.

os.system returns the exit code of the command, not its output. You turn this number into a string, but this will not do what you want it to do. It is also deprecated. You might want to look at the subprocess module.

output = subprocess.check_output('command', shell=True)

Furthermore, you need to match using the module re. Check its documentation for the precise syntax, but it should look something like re.match(your_pattern, yourstring).

Finally, although your version is not wrong, it is more common to loop through a list like in the sample below. It is slightly shorter and more readable as you save a variable and a call to len. It is also considered more pythonic.

for nic in listNIC:
    if re.match(pattern, nic):
        wlanNIC = nic
        break

In [23]: df1
Out[23]: 
  Name    income
0    a        $1
1    b    $2,000
2    c   $10,000
3    d  $140,000

In [24]: cols_to_change = ['income']

In [25]: for col in cols_to_change:
    ...:     df1[col] = df1[col].str.replace('[$,]', '')
    ...: 

In [26]: df1
Out[26]: 
  Name  income
0    a       1
1    b    2000
2    c   10000
3    d  140000