I’m working on a discord bot using discord.py and I need help with message detection. Right now my bot only triggers when a specific keyword appears at the very beginning of a message. But I want it to work when the keyword shows up anywhere in the sentence, like in the middle or at the end.
For example, if someone types “hello there friends” and my trigger word is “there”, the bot should still respond. Currently it only works if they type “there hello friends”.
Is there a way to check the entire message content instead of just the start? What’s the best approach to scan through the whole text for my trigger words?
The message.content.lower() approach works great for basic detection. I use if trigger_word.lower() in message.content.lower(): which handles case insensitivity perfectly. Watch out for punctuation though - “there!” or “there,” will trigger fine, but “there’s” might act weird depending on what you’re doing. Pro tip I learned the hard way: throw your trigger words in a list or set if you’re planning to add more later. Trust me, you’ll want to expand beyond one keyword eventually and it makes the code way easier to maintain.
I’ve been in this exact situation building internal bots for our team. The solutions people mentioned work, but they get messy fast when you scale.
Multiple trigger words? Different response types? Case variations? Message filtering? You’ll write tons of conditional logic that breaks every time requirements change.
I automate this whole workflow now. Set up triggers for any keyword position, handle case sensitivity automatically, manage multiple keywords without code changes, plus add response delays or user targeting.
Best part - you can modify trigger words, add new responses, or change detection logic without touching your bot code. Just update the automation flow and it works instantly.
I’ve used this for customer support bots, team notifications, and content moderation. Way more reliable than hardcoded string matching.
You can use the in operator, but watch out for partial matches. If your trigger word is “there” it’ll also catch “weather” or “father”. For exact matching, use regex with word boundaries: import re then if re.search(r'\bthere\b', message.content, re.IGNORECASE):. The \b matches complete words only, and re.IGNORECASE handles case sensitivity. This has saved me from tons of false triggers. You could also try message.content.lower().split() to check each word individually, but regex is cleaner.
Had this exact problem last month building a moderation bot. I mixed different approaches based on what I needed. For basic detection, ‘keyword’ in message.content.lower() works fine, but I got overlapping matches with multiple triggers running at once. I started preprocessing messages by stripping common punctuation first - message.content.translate(str.maketrans(‘’, ‘’, string.punctuation)) - then doing the search. Stopped weird edge cases where punctuation broke detection. Discord.py handles messages pretty fast too, so don’t stress about performance unless you’re dealing with thousands of messages per second.
honestly just use message.content.find('there') - it returns -1 if not found, otherwise gives you the position. works great for basic stuff and you don’t need regex unless you’re doing something fancy with it