Hello,

There are several ways to find substrings in string, You could use substring in string you could use string.index(substring), or you could use string.find(substring) or even use regex.

I'm trying to understand if there is a significant difference between them for my use case, which is finding people names in article titles for example:

I want to check if Leonardo DiCaprio is in Leonardo DiCaprio gets called out for boarding superyacht: ‘eco-hypocrite’

What I usually do is:

def is_substring_in_string(substring: str, string: str):        
    #same thing as before but on the article title.
    string_alphanumeric = ''.join(e for e in string if e.isalnum()).lower()

    return substring in string_alphanumeric

def main():
    names = ["Harrison Ford","Leonardo DiCaprio","Eddie Murphy","Bruce Willis","Will Smith"]

    #removes unwanted charecters such as !@#$%^&*() etc and converts to lower case
    names_alnum_lower = [''.join(e for e in x if e.isalnum()).lower() for x in names]

    article_title = "Leonardo DiCaprio gets called out for boarding superyacht: eco-hypocrite"

    for idx, lower_name in enumerate(names_alnum_lower):
        if is_substring_in_string(lower_name,article_title):
            print(f"Actor Name: '{names[idx]}' is in article title '{article_title}'")

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Imagine there are a bunch of articles and people's names. Is this method acceptable or will I be better off using regex or something else?