What is the regular expression for checking if the word consists only of the given characters?

Question

I need a regular expression for python 2.7 that checks if a given word consists only of the letters 'a', 'b', 'r', 'e', 'd'. Please Help!

I tried the following code:

text = raw_input ('Enter Text:')

result = re.match(r'[abred]+', text)

if result:
    print ('Match')      
else :
    print ("Doesn't Match")

However, for example by inputting "aaaq" it counts it as a matching text.

Answer 1

In order to modify your regex to work you need to use the ^ and $ characters. ^ matches the beginning of the string, and $ matches the end of the string. So if you were to modify your regex to be ^[abred]+$ it would match strings that only contained the letters a, b, r, e, and d. As opposed to the current regex ([abred]+), which will match any string that had those letters in it.