identify substring using str.contains by mixing AND and OR

I am trying to identify substrings in a given string using str.contains while mixing the OR and AND

I know that OR can be represented by |

str.contains("error|break|insufficient")

and that AND can be represented by AND

str.contains("error|break|insufficient") & str.contains("status")

I would like to mix the OR and AND together. Example is to identify strings that have "error" OR "break OR ("insufficient" AND "status")

So for sentence like "error break insufficient" -> it will be able to identify. But now is not able to because there is no "status" in the sentence

Solution

One approach:

import pandas as pd

# toy data
s = pd.Series(["hello", "world", "simple", "error", "break", "insufficient something status", "status"])

# create and mask
insufficient_and_status = s.str.contains("insufficient") & s.str.contains("status")

# create or mask
break_or_error = s.str.contains("error|break", regex=True)

# or the two mask
mask = break_or_error | insufficient_and_status

res = s[mask]
print(res)

Output

3                            error
4                            break
5    insufficient something status
dtype: object

Alternative, using a single regex:

mask = s.str.contains("error|break|(insufficient.+status|status.+insufficient)", regex=True)

res = s[mask]
print(res)

The alternative is based on the fact that if the string contains insufficient and status then at least one of the patterns insufficient.+status or status.+insufficient matches (i.e. or insufficient occurs first or status does)