How to use re.search on a list? - regex

Question

I have tried to change the re.search to re.match and so. But still it will show "No match result" no matter what I type.
I think there could be a problem in the code, since I made this code without fully comprehend the concept behind it.
Basically, I am trying to do a "search engine" to look for all the matching name if a word is given and matches one of the word in the names. Can someone tell me what is wrong?
import re
searchlist=[ *insert name here* ]
word_s = input("Search : ")
search_list = re.compile(r'\b(?:%s)\b' % '|'.join(searchlist), re.I|re.M)
result = re.search(search_list, word_s)
if result:
print("Match Result: ", result.group())
else:
print("No match result.")

Answer 1

Your last comment shows the problem:
In your code, searchlist is a list of the search terms (the things the regex searches for), not the list of strings to be searched.
For example:
searchlist = ["Fundamentals", "Engineering"]
search_list = re.compile(r'\b(?:%s)\b' % '|'.join(searchlist), re.I|re.M)
Now search_list is \b(?:Fundamentals|Engineering)\b, so it can be used as regex that will find if any of those terms appears in word_s
result = re.search(search_list, word_s)
You want to do the exact opposite:
books = ["Fundamentals of Organic Chemistry, International Edition", "Engineering Mechanics: Statics In SI Units"]
word_s = input("Search for: ")
word_re = re.compile(r"\b{}\b".format(word_s), re.I)
for book in books:
if re.search(word_re, book):
print("First Match Result: ", book)
break # Abort search after first match
else: # Only executed if the for loop was exhausted
print("No match result.")